Well in my case it is because I am dyslexic, and despite four and a half decades of teaching myself tricks and compensation techniques, some things just fall thought.
Proof? It is hard to take this claim seriously when you provide no proof and post as an AC. I am not saying you aren't right, I am just saying that you are making an assertion with no way to know who you are or verify what you are saying...
It might be single platform. Have you actually used it? From where I sit it is either GIMPs equal or better in almost every way? The GIMP team has been at it for 16 years, and still aren't at the level of Pixelmator... at least when it comes to vital features like, say, high bit depth. I can do real commercial deadline critical work in it and I can't in GIMP.
But I also like how you dismiss it for costing $60 when GIMP is free. How is that even relevant?
More like three generations since the word entered the lexicon in 1952 (or thereabouts). But I do take your point. And I know people who prefer to be called crippled as well. But far from the majority of people.
And this is what I was saying about context. Even in the case of words who have a hateful history, it is still inappropriate — in most people's minds — to use them generally, in public, in what we might call the "default context". Gimp is one of those words.
Even if you say, as many people in this discussion have, that the GIMP team meant Gimp in the Pulp Fiction S&M sense; I don't get why that is anyway more appropriate.
Context matters and you have to walk a very long way to get to a point where Gimp is an appropriate name for a program intended to be used by the masses. Most people aren't going to take that walk with you. Just like if you have to explain a joke, it isn't funny; so it is that if you have to explain why something isn't offensive, it is a lost cause.
The name hurts the app. To the best of my knowledge they have no corporate sponsorship, no companies donating developers and other resources. The closest you get is CinePaint which is a fork of GIMP, isn't worked on by the GIMP team, and (we should all notice) changed the name.
I am not saying all will be rosy if they change the name, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Did you miss the etc at the end of the list? I mentioned those two because they happen to be big for me, but it is a bigger list than that.
But let us take the two I mentions: High Bit Depth, and CYMK. If you are a photographer, or do prepress work that is like saying "sure the compiler doesn't support strings or floating point numbers, but look at everything else it supports!" Those two are worth $700, because without them, I can't can't use GIMP.
And if you look at the GIMP roadmap, GIMP won't reach a rough Parity until version 3.6. RIght now the team is running a couple of years between releases, but let's pretend they can get it up to one every six month. In that case it will still be 2.5 years before they get to that point.
Please point me to the plugin that supports high bit depth throughout the entire application and plugins, or the one that adds non destructive editing (aka layer effects). Because if you can't, then you are wrong...
There was a time I was quite willing to donate the same amount I spent in Photoshop upgrades each year to the GIMP team. If they would just change the name to something that wasn't offensive. However they drew a line in sand and refused to even consider it. I personally believe that if they had been willing to change the name back when they also could have gotten corporate sponsorship, had it taught in more schools, and other things that would have been to the good of the app and the community.
I am not saying this out of a sense of entitlement. What I am saying is that lots and lots of FLOSS folk point to GIMP as a full blown alternative to Photoshop. Say it is just as good, and point to it as a victory of Free Software.
My point is that is isn't. For far too long it has been given a pass because it was more or less the only game in town. People have been making excuses for its shortcomings, and defending the insane name.
When I talked about other software titles, I was saying "look how far other people have gotten in less time". If the GIMP team had been smart and changed the name, found a corporate sponsor, or been able to get some kind of consultancy going; then they would have the luxury to speed up the pace of development and provide a real challenge to photoshop.
Instead people are exited that it just got Curves. If it were any other app people would be calling that a joke.
In how many more years? This morning I looked at the GIMP Roadmap, and it won't be until GMP 3.6 before it will have a rough parity with Photoshop 7 (released in 2002ish). GIMP development has been very slow to date, but if we were to assume they could do one release every 6 months, then we are talking 2.5 years before we get to that point.
In the mean time the goal posts keep getting moved forward. GEGL reached a stable release in 2006. GIMP still doesn't have support for high bit dept.
It is time we stop giving them a pass, and saying things like "now that they have supported XX, this feature can happen". It is time to hold the GIMP team to a high standard.
And then let us look at two things that just came in with 2.8:
The ability to group layers
Curves
I will never say you can't get stuff done, or do good things in GIMP; but if you are used to using such fundamental things as what I enumerated below then GIMP is just painful to use. Doubly so for photography.
Let's take one last run at this: Do you believe context ever matters in language or word choice? Are there words you should not expose children to until a certain age? Is the way you talk to your lover in the bedroom the same as how you address your boss? If the CEO of where you worked disabled, would you call him a gimp to his face?
If you believe that language has context, or If the answer to any of those (or questions like them) above was "no", then why is it appropriate to name an image editing program with a word that is — in this day and age — primarily used to insult, demean, and/or hurt?
I don't care that it isn't photoshop. I do, however, care that when it comes to features GIMP 2.8 still compares badly to Photoshop 7. No non destructive editing, no CYMK, I don't see anything in the announcement about high color depths, etc.
I don't need GIMP to be a clone of photoshop. I don't need the keystrokes, the icons, even the core philosophy to be the same. But I do need it to compare well against the feature set of PS7, which came out a decade ago.
We know that small teams can produce apps that are comparable to PS7, in much less time than the 16 years it took us to get to GIMP 2.8 — Paint.NET, Acorn, Pixelmator, etc.
It is more than time to stop giving the GIMP team a pass, and start holding them to a higher standard.
Ah those glory days when we could just toss around racial slurs, and insulting terms about women, the disabled, and the mentally handicapped; and we didn't have to worry because we were white men... is that what you were talking about.
Political Correctness might be a bad idea, and certainly one that can go to far; but let us not confuse PC for not insulting huge swaths of people for your entertainment. It was never a good idea.
Considering your signature, I fear this is going to fall on deaf ears. You have a very high threshold for offense, and believe everyone should too. I suspect this because you are willing to equate a piece of computer hardware to criminal sodomy out in public, but please correct me if I am wrong.
But here's the thing, if you are a disabled person then Gimp is just like "the N word", and insult hurled at you in anger and derision. It is also a word you reserve the right to yourself. You don't have to like it, you don't have to agree, but you do have to accept that, because that is the reality out in the world — at least with enough people to matter.
And I can see why you think your explanation, giving the name in full, is cogent. But here's the thing: If the default were to say "The GNU Image Manipulation Program" and some people shortened it to "GIMP" then that would be one thing. Unfortunately that isn't the case. The devs of the program called it GIMP from the beginning, and took a very long time to accept that anyone could be offended by that. And now it is a line in the sand to them, one they will not cross.
The name is a problem. It stops people using it, it stops schools teaching it, it hurts the app.
And what could/should I be doing? Are you saying that naming your product after an insulting term is appropriate? Or that it isn't a barrier to adoption?
People have tried to get the project to change its name, and the team has refused. So forgive me it seems correct to point out the name as one of many issues where the app falls behind.
Can I point to apps like Acorn and Paint.Net and Pixwlmator and Krita and others instead? These are all apps that were started long after GIMP was, and yet have managed to support things like 16 bit colorspaces, and other things.
While they might not all be FLOSS, I would argue that all of them are better than GIMP because they are far more usable, have far better support for colorspaces and high bit depth, were developed AFTER the GIMP was (and in less time), and don't have insulting names. I am not kidding about the latter btw, the GIMP folk have drawn a line in the sand when it comes to the name, but they are simply wrong there (like they are on so many things). It is childish, it is insulting, and it is unprofessional.
But that isn't why I avoid GIMP, it is because of the glacial pace of development, the horrible usability, the utter lack of non-destructive editing, and so many other factors,
As the list at the start of this post, small teams can produce high quality tools. The GIMP team has been spinning its wheels (and arguing what color they should be) for years and years, and after they release 2.8 (sometime this decade?) it will still pale in comparison to Photoshop 7. And that was released a decade ago.
In the mean time I rarely open Photoshop, unless I have something really hardcore to do. 95% of the time the aforementioned Acorn does what I need. I can't say the same about GIMP.
Its almost like you are saying Google is a business or something. Anything you don't run an manage yourself can disappear at any time*. It's about calculated risk. If the service is useful, then I will use it. I never use any kind of cloud storage to keep data I don't back up elsewhere, and neither should you.
But if you aren't going to use something because it might go away, well that just about describes everything. I am glad Google is getting more focused, trying things and then getting rid of them if they don't work out. This way they have more resources to keep trying new things.
*: And things that you do manage 100% yourself are probably about as (or more) likely to go away, in my experience.
Live in a big, public transportation, friendly cities. I was born and raised in one, and now live in another. You would be shocked by the people you meet on the bus.
But again, that is Competing not Combating. I am complaining about the strange word choice. Nothing you said casts the events in a way that justifies the word.
Look LG & Moz aren't doing this to fight some evil in the world. They are doing this because they have a product (and/or services) they want to sell. I am not saying this isn't a good thing, but this is good old fashioned competition, not a holy quest.
Clearly you are happy with Obj-C as is. I don't think you can make that comment about engineers in general. The need to update declarations, for me at least, means I tend to write longer methods that are harder to read because it is tedious to define another method at the right visibility, and XCode's refactors rarely work (or when they do, they don't do the correct thing) for me. I find myself less likely to subclass or do other good practices. And reading the code of other Obj-C programmers I see the same problems with them.
I worked in Obj-C in the late 80s and early 90s, and came back to it periodically since OSX came about. What I see is a lot of people writing code as they did in the 80s and 90s, ignoring the best practices we learned in the intervening decades. The apps may be good, but the code is nowhere near as good as it should be.
XCode — compared to IntelliJ, Netbeans, Eclipse, or VisualStudio — is merely OK as an IDE. InterfaceBuilder being the only shining star.
I am sorry it is a myth to assume that brevity is the enemy of clarity, or that verbosity is its friend. Exactly how is getAt:less clear than objextAtIndex:. To be absurd I could point out that that method name makes many assumptions about how the object should be retrieved, what kind of collection it is, etc that could also be spelled out. But no one assumes they should be, so why is the "object" part of that name needed.
Names should be clear and as long as they need to be, needless specificity is not an aid to understanding.
But most importantly, there is nothing in your arguments to say why Obj-C should not be better, why we need header files, why the language should have remained so static for so long. The fact that one can get by doesn't mean that we shouldn't all advocate for better tools. There are languages I like far far better but Obj-C but I don't pretend they are somehow perfect or without need for improvement. Craftsmen should always be striving to do better and make better things
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Yes I made a typo, and if /. let me edit a post I would. But that being said, it was also clear from context.
Well in my case it is because I am dyslexic, and despite four and a half decades of teaching myself tricks and compensation techniques, some things just fall thought.
But, you know, thanks for pointing that out...
And people who have legacy apps who use Motif. This is a good move for those, and the people who need to support them.
And Historians, don't discount that. Engineers have short memories and we are loosing important artifacts all the time...
Proof? It is hard to take this claim seriously when you provide no proof and post as an AC. I am not saying you aren't right, I am just saying that you are making an assertion with no way to know who you are or verify what you are saying...
"...Aimed at a crip?" Charming.
I have personally seen it happen more than once. Up here in the PC land of Portland. But why is it any more appropriate in the S&M sense?
It might be single platform. Have you actually used it? From where I sit it is either GIMPs equal or better in almost every way? The GIMP team has been at it for 16 years, and still aren't at the level of Pixelmator... at least when it comes to vital features like, say, high bit depth. I can do real commercial deadline critical work in it and I can't in GIMP.
But I also like how you dismiss it for costing $60 when GIMP is free. How is that even relevant?
More like three generations since the word entered the lexicon in 1952 (or thereabouts). But I do take your point. And I know people who prefer to be called crippled as well. But far from the majority of people.
And this is what I was saying about context. Even in the case of words who have a hateful history, it is still inappropriate — in most people's minds — to use them generally, in public, in what we might call the "default context". Gimp is one of those words.
Even if you say, as many people in this discussion have, that the GIMP team meant Gimp in the Pulp Fiction S&M sense; I don't get why that is anyway more appropriate.
Context matters and you have to walk a very long way to get to a point where Gimp is an appropriate name for a program intended to be used by the masses. Most people aren't going to take that walk with you. Just like if you have to explain a joke, it isn't funny; so it is that if you have to explain why something isn't offensive, it is a lost cause.
The name hurts the app. To the best of my knowledge they have no corporate sponsorship, no companies donating developers and other resources. The closest you get is CinePaint which is a fork of GIMP, isn't worked on by the GIMP team, and (we should all notice) changed the name.
I am not saying all will be rosy if they change the name, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Did you miss the etc at the end of the list? I mentioned those two because they happen to be big for me, but it is a bigger list than that.
But let us take the two I mentions: High Bit Depth, and CYMK. If you are a photographer, or do prepress work that is like saying "sure the compiler doesn't support strings or floating point numbers, but look at everything else it supports!" Those two are worth $700, because without them, I can't can't use GIMP.
And if you look at the GIMP roadmap, GIMP won't reach a rough Parity until version 3.6. RIght now the team is running a couple of years between releases, but let's pretend they can get it up to one every six month. In that case it will still be 2.5 years before they get to that point.
Please point me to the plugin that supports high bit depth throughout the entire application and plugins, or the one that adds non destructive editing (aka layer effects). Because if you can't, then you are wrong...
There was a time I was quite willing to donate the same amount I spent in Photoshop upgrades each year to the GIMP team. If they would just change the name to something that wasn't offensive. However they drew a line in sand and refused to even consider it. I personally believe that if they had been willing to change the name back when they also could have gotten corporate sponsorship, had it taught in more schools, and other things that would have been to the good of the app and the community.
I am not saying this out of a sense of entitlement. What I am saying is that lots and lots of FLOSS folk point to GIMP as a full blown alternative to Photoshop. Say it is just as good, and point to it as a victory of Free Software.
My point is that is isn't. For far too long it has been given a pass because it was more or less the only game in town. People have been making excuses for its shortcomings, and defending the insane name.
When I talked about other software titles, I was saying "look how far other people have gotten in less time". If the GIMP team had been smart and changed the name, found a corporate sponsor, or been able to get some kind of consultancy going; then they would have the luxury to speed up the pace of development and provide a real challenge to photoshop.
Instead people are exited that it just got Curves. If it were any other app people would be calling that a joke.
PS: And Paint.net doesn't run on OSX or Linux ;)
In how many more years? This morning I looked at the GIMP Roadmap, and it won't be until GMP 3.6 before it will have a rough parity with Photoshop 7 (released in 2002ish). GIMP development has been very slow to date, but if we were to assume they could do one release every 6 months, then we are talking 2.5 years before we get to that point.
In the mean time the goal posts keep getting moved forward. GEGL reached a stable release in 2006. GIMP still doesn't have support for high bit dept.
It is time we stop giving them a pass, and saying things like "now that they have supported XX, this feature can happen". It is time to hold the GIMP team to a high standard.
Here are the big three I care about:
And then let us look at two things that just came in with 2.8:
I will never say you can't get stuff done, or do good things in GIMP; but if you are used to using such fundamental things as what I enumerated below then GIMP is just painful to use. Doubly so for photography.
Let's take one last run at this: Do you believe context ever matters in language or word choice? Are there words you should not expose children to until a certain age? Is the way you talk to your lover in the bedroom the same as how you address your boss? If the CEO of where you worked disabled, would you call him a gimp to his face?
If you believe that language has context, or If the answer to any of those (or questions like them) above was "no", then why is it appropriate to name an image editing program with a word that is — in this day and age — primarily used to insult, demean, and/or hurt?
I don't care that it isn't photoshop. I do, however, care that when it comes to features GIMP 2.8 still compares badly to Photoshop 7. No non destructive editing, no CYMK, I don't see anything in the announcement about high color depths, etc.
I don't need GIMP to be a clone of photoshop. I don't need the keystrokes, the icons, even the core philosophy to be the same. But I do need it to compare well against the feature set of PS7, which came out a decade ago.
We know that small teams can produce apps that are comparable to PS7, in much less time than the 16 years it took us to get to GIMP 2.8 — Paint.NET, Acorn, Pixelmator, etc.
It is more than time to stop giving the GIMP team a pass, and start holding them to a higher standard.
Ah those glory days when we could just toss around racial slurs, and insulting terms about women, the disabled, and the mentally handicapped; and we didn't have to worry because we were white men... is that what you were talking about.
Political Correctness might be a bad idea, and certainly one that can go to far; but let us not confuse PC for not insulting huge swaths of people for your entertainment. It was never a good idea.
Deal.
Considering your signature, I fear this is going to fall on deaf ears. You have a very high threshold for offense, and believe everyone should too. I suspect this because you are willing to equate a piece of computer hardware to criminal sodomy out in public, but please correct me if I am wrong.
But here's the thing, if you are a disabled person then Gimp is just like "the N word", and insult hurled at you in anger and derision. It is also a word you reserve the right to yourself. You don't have to like it, you don't have to agree, but you do have to accept that, because that is the reality out in the world — at least with enough people to matter.
And I can see why you think your explanation, giving the name in full, is cogent. But here's the thing: If the default were to say "The GNU Image Manipulation Program" and some people shortened it to "GIMP" then that would be one thing. Unfortunately that isn't the case. The devs of the program called it GIMP from the beginning, and took a very long time to accept that anyone could be offended by that. And now it is a line in the sand to them, one they will not cross.
The name is a problem. It stops people using it, it stops schools teaching it, it hurts the app.
And what could/should I be doing? Are you saying that naming your product after an insulting term is appropriate? Or that it isn't a barrier to adoption?
People have tried to get the project to change its name, and the team has refused. So forgive me it seems correct to point out the name as one of many issues where the app falls behind.
Can I point to apps like Acorn and Paint.Net and Pixwlmator and Krita and others instead? These are all apps that were started long after GIMP was, and yet have managed to support things like 16 bit colorspaces, and other things.
While they might not all be FLOSS, I would argue that all of them are better than GIMP because they are far more usable, have far better support for colorspaces and high bit depth, were developed AFTER the GIMP was (and in less time), and don't have insulting names. I am not kidding about the latter btw, the GIMP folk have drawn a line in the sand when it comes to the name, but they are simply wrong there (like they are on so many things). It is childish, it is insulting, and it is unprofessional.
But that isn't why I avoid GIMP, it is because of the glacial pace of development, the horrible usability, the utter lack of non-destructive editing, and so many other factors,
As the list at the start of this post, small teams can produce high quality tools. The GIMP team has been spinning its wheels (and arguing what color they should be) for years and years, and after they release 2.8 (sometime this decade?) it will still pale in comparison to Photoshop 7. And that was released a decade ago.
In the mean time I rarely open Photoshop, unless I have something really hardcore to do. 95% of the time the aforementioned Acorn does what I need. I can't say the same about GIMP.
Its almost like you are saying Google is a business or something. Anything you don't run an manage yourself can disappear at any time*. It's about calculated risk. If the service is useful, then I will use it. I never use any kind of cloud storage to keep data I don't back up elsewhere, and neither should you.
But if you aren't going to use something because it might go away, well that just about describes everything. I am glad Google is getting more focused, trying things and then getting rid of them if they don't work out. This way they have more resources to keep trying new things.
*: And things that you do manage 100% yourself are probably about as (or more) likely to go away, in my experience.
Live in a big, public transportation, friendly cities. I was born and raised in one, and now live in another. You would be shocked by the people you meet on the bus.
We can't tell based on their data, since it isn't about the general pool of free software, just what is in Debian.
But again, that is Competing not Combating. I am complaining about the strange word choice. Nothing you said casts the events in a way that justifies the word.
Look LG & Moz aren't doing this to fight some evil in the world. They are doing this because they have a product (and/or services) they want to sell. I am not saying this isn't a good thing, but this is good old fashioned competition, not a holy quest.
Clearly you are happy with Obj-C as is. I don't think you can make that comment about engineers in general. The need to update declarations, for me at least, means I tend to write longer methods that are harder to read because it is tedious to define another method at the right visibility, and XCode's refactors rarely work (or when they do, they don't do the correct thing) for me. I find myself less likely to subclass or do other good practices. And reading the code of other Obj-C programmers I see the same problems with them.
I worked in Obj-C in the late 80s and early 90s, and came back to it periodically since OSX came about. What I see is a lot of people writing code as they did in the 80s and 90s, ignoring the best practices we learned in the intervening decades. The apps may be good, but the code is nowhere near as good as it should be.
XCode — compared to IntelliJ, Netbeans, Eclipse, or VisualStudio — is merely OK as an IDE. InterfaceBuilder being the only shining star.
I am sorry it is a myth to assume that brevity is the enemy of clarity, or that verbosity is its friend. Exactly how is getAt: less clear than objextAtIndex:. To be absurd I could point out that that method name makes many assumptions about how the object should be retrieved, what kind of collection it is, etc that could also be spelled out. But no one assumes they should be, so why is the "object" part of that name needed.
Names should be clear and as long as they need to be, needless specificity is not an aid to understanding.
But most importantly, there is nothing in your arguments to say why Obj-C should not be better, why we need header files, why the language should have remained so static for so long. The fact that one can get by doesn't mean that we shouldn't all advocate for better tools. There are languages I like far far better but Obj-C but I don't pretend they are somehow perfect or without need for improvement. Craftsmen should always be striving to do better and make better things