4 ms·

> So for me the question is why there are still people that enjoy working as if their computers are using a 25 year old developer experience. For me it's the q

by dan00 10y ago

> So for me the question is why there are still people that enjoy working as if their computers are using a 25 year old developer experience. For me it's the question, why it's so hard to understand that people have different likings without to downgrade them? Everyone thinks that his/her decisions are the most sensible ones, but in most cases they aren't.

marklgr 10y ago
It often _is_ the most sensible choice, _for them_. The problem is, not everyone is doing the same job in the same environement, and they have a hard time realizing that. Their empathy/imagination stays too close to their own experience.
- toyg 10y ago
  ... the same job in the same environment coming from the same background. If you've spent 5 years at university training yourself in vim or emacs, it makes sense to keep using that; if you've started on the job with jEdit or whatnot, it's hard to justify giving up high productivity for several years for some random promise of even-better riches down the line.
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    What does jEdit give you that you couldn't learn in Emacs in a day or two? Basic text editing is pretty straight forward to learn in Emacs. The part that takes time is learning all the other cool features, and that can be done gradually over time without giving up immediate productivity.
    - toyg 10y ago
      jEdit uses java-like beanshell for scripts, which is pretty different from elisp. So now you have to rewrite all your custom macros in a language you don't know and with an entirely different paradigm. But tbh, it's just an example -- any advanced workflow will require some time to adjust, for benefits which are hard to quantify. Tried switching from QWERTY to DVORAK recently? Same thing.
coldtea 10y ago
>For me it's the question, why it's so hard to understand that people have different likings without to downgrade them? Because while everyone can have this or that preferences, personal taste is not the be all end all argument, except in the "it's a free country" way. Whenever we want to assess the state of our tools, and what we need to make them better etc, we need to reach an agreement beyond "works for me" and personal taste.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Who's "we"? If someone reaches a maximum of productivity using an editor made in the 70's, who is anyone else to tell them otherwise? Preferred tooling for reaching maximum productivity is an inherently personal thing - you may do your best in emacs, the other guy in vi, yet someone else in Sublime3 on Windows. Nobody is qualified to make broad sweeping judgments as to what works best for everyone. A few try, and some inferences can be made to the lowest common denominator (see modern UI design practices), but if we're talking productivity for the super-literate user, then no, absolutely not.
  - cname 10y ago
    People usually claim that one thing is more productive than the other without any real evidence. I think it's mostly just so we can stick with something out of familiarity. Or sometimes it's so we can switch to something else because we're bored. The "it feels right to me" argument just seems unbeatable (you can't argue with it without seeming like a jerk). For example, I might say that I'm super productive in IDE X, but I don't know for sure that I couldn't be more productive in IDE Y or Editor Z with various plugins. I haven't consulted any research in making my decision nor have I conducted any real research of my own. I guess maybe it doesn't matter. If everyone is "happy", maybe that's good enough. But I see people struggling to do certain things in their environment of choice and that ends up having an effect on not just them but potentially their coworkers.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      But that's an unknown right? You may or may not be more productive in IDE Y, but making the effort to find that out takes more time, your most precious resource, for something that may not even turn out to be true, and then your investment is wasted. I think this is why people tend to make the broad statements about "X is better than Y" since they only have their own experience to go on, but without full knowledge of how someone else's mind works, it's a fool's errand. Even if changing tools would solve the things you can observe and attach a "time wasted doing X" quantity, you don't know if they won't struggle with something else after changing.

by dan00 10y ago

marklgr 10y ago

It often _is_ the most sensible choice, _for them_. The problem is, not everyone is doing the same job in the same environement, and they have a hard time realizing that. Their empathy/imagination stays too close to their own experience.

toyg 10y ago
... the same job in the same environment coming from the same background. If you've spent 5 years at university training yourself in vim or emacs, it makes sense to keep using that; if you've started on the job with jEdit or whatnot, it's hard to justify giving up high productivity for several years for some random promise of even-better riches down the line.
- wtetzner 10y ago
  What does jEdit give you that you couldn't learn in Emacs in a day or two? Basic text editing is pretty straight forward to learn in Emacs. The part that takes time is learning all the other cool features, and that can be done gradually over time without giving up immediate productivity.
  - toyg 10y ago
    jEdit uses java-like beanshell for scripts, which is pretty different from elisp. So now you have to rewrite all your custom macros in a language you don't know and with an entirely different paradigm. But tbh, it's just an example -- any advanced workflow will require some time to adjust, for benefits which are hard to quantify. Tried switching from QWERTY to DVORAK recently? Same thing.

coldtea 10y ago

>For me it's the question, why it's so hard to understand that people have different likings without to downgrade them? Because while everyone can have this or that preferences, personal taste is not the be all end all argument, except in the "it's a free country" way. Whenever we want to assess the state of our tools, and what we need to make them better etc, we need to reach an agreement beyond "works for me" and personal taste.

Karunamon 10y ago
Who's "we"? If someone reaches a maximum of productivity using an editor made in the 70's, who is anyone else to tell them otherwise? Preferred tooling for reaching maximum productivity is an inherently personal thing - you may do your best in emacs, the other guy in vi, yet someone else in Sublime3 on Windows. Nobody is qualified to make broad sweeping judgments as to what works best for everyone. A few try, and some inferences can be made to the lowest common denominator (see modern UI design practices), but if we're talking productivity for the super-literate user, then no, absolutely not.
- cname 10y ago
  People usually claim that one thing is more productive than the other without any real evidence. I think it's mostly just so we can stick with something out of familiarity. Or sometimes it's so we can switch to something else because we're bored. The "it feels right to me" argument just seems unbeatable (you can't argue with it without seeming like a jerk). For example, I might say that I'm super productive in IDE X, but I don't know for sure that I couldn't be more productive in IDE Y or Editor Z with various plugins. I haven't consulted any research in making my decision nor have I conducted any real research of my own. I guess maybe it doesn't matter. If everyone is "happy", maybe that's good enough. But I see people struggling to do certain things in their environment of choice and that ends up having an effect on not just them but potentially their coworkers.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    But that's an unknown right? You may or may not be more productive in IDE Y, but making the effort to find that out takes more time, your most precious resource, for something that may not even turn out to be true, and then your investment is wasted. I think this is why people tend to make the broad statements about "X is better than Y" since they only have their own experience to go on, but without full knowledge of how someone else's mind works, it's a fool's errand. Even if changing tools would solve the things you can observe and attach a "time wasted doing X" quantity, you don't know if they won't struggle with something else after changing.