3 ms·

It's probably part "complexity fetish" (ie you are not a real programmer or computer whiz unless you live and die in a teletype emulator). The other problem is

by scroot 8y ago

It's probably part "complexity fetish" (ie you are not a real programmer or computer whiz unless you live and die in a teletype emulator). The other problem is that a couple of generations of developers are now out in the world who have never experienced these systems.

cm2187 8y ago
Part of that is probably laziness, it’s hard work to keep things simple, it requires to enforce a lot of discipline, to redesign things frequently, etc. I think also increasingly there is the view that users shouldn’t even be aware of these things. If you grew up on iOS, you have never even seen a filesystem, let alone an OS directory structure.
- scroot 8y ago
  Yes I agree. It's hard work. You'd think a trillion dollar personal computing company like Apple would put in that work. As for hiding things from users, what we need are good metaphors (ideally layered atop one another). You want users to be able to peel back one layer if they can't do everything they need. Things like spreadsheets and hypercard started getting there, but personal computing went the entirely opposite direction.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    And in many ways, docker style containers are an ugly way around not having a clean and modernized format for applications, which in the spirit of MacOS' extensions should really be a single self contained file, with a declaration of its dependencies and privileges required. Instead of that we have to package a whole OS image when building a container to go around the millions of ugly inter-dependencies between the components of the OS and the app.
    - scroot 8y ago
      Recently I've come to believe that you don't need "applications" at all, but rather components that can be put together every which way. OpenDoc was sort of like that and something like a smalltalk system is also sort of like that. Either way, these *nix style operating systems are not great for personal computer users. They can either interact with their machines as pure consumers (app level) or learn a full blown programming language and the ins and outs of the OS. There's nothing in between. It's like having zoology and quantum physics, but without biology, chemistry, etc in the middle.
      - cm2187 8y ago
        Yeah. But there is a case for keeping it simple even for professional / server stuff. I mean the success of python is the best illustration. It's a dog by any metric but it allows to keep things simple, which has a lot of value in itself. Developer and IT people have enough complexity dealing with their domain not having to add the complexity of their tools to that.
  - kitsunesoba 8y ago
    >Yes I agree. It's hard work. You'd think a trillion dollar personal computing company like Apple would put in that work. As a whole I think software dev culture has tilted a little too far in the direction of developer convenience. It’s our job to make the lives of our users easier, but it’s also very easy to fall into the trap of settling for “good enough”, which leads to the production of software that in reality is just barely hanging on the edge of “good enough”. To hit the moon you need to shoot for the stars so to speak, and as of late we’ve barely even been shooting for the mountaintops.

by scroot 8y ago

cm2187 8y ago

Part of that is probably laziness, it’s hard work to keep things simple, it requires to enforce a lot of discipline, to redesign things frequently, etc. I think also increasingly there is the view that users shouldn’t even be aware of these things. If you grew up on iOS, you have never even seen a filesystem, let alone an OS directory structure.

scroot 8y ago
Yes I agree. It's hard work. You'd think a trillion dollar personal computing company like Apple would put in that work. As for hiding things from users, what we need are good metaphors (ideally layered atop one another). You want users to be able to peel back one layer if they can't do everything they need. Things like spreadsheets and hypercard started getting there, but personal computing went the entirely opposite direction.
- cm2187 8y ago
  And in many ways, docker style containers are an ugly way around not having a clean and modernized format for applications, which in the spirit of MacOS' extensions should really be a single self contained file, with a declaration of its dependencies and privileges required. Instead of that we have to package a whole OS image when building a container to go around the millions of ugly inter-dependencies between the components of the OS and the app.
  - scroot 8y ago
    Recently I've come to believe that you don't need "applications" at all, but rather components that can be put together every which way. OpenDoc was sort of like that and something like a smalltalk system is also sort of like that. Either way, these *nix style operating systems are not great for personal computer users. They can either interact with their machines as pure consumers (app level) or learn a full blown programming language and the ins and outs of the OS. There's nothing in between. It's like having zoology and quantum physics, but without biology, chemistry, etc in the middle.
    - cm2187 8y ago
      Yeah. But there is a case for keeping it simple even for professional / server stuff. I mean the success of python is the best illustration. It's a dog by any metric but it allows to keep things simple, which has a lot of value in itself. Developer and IT people have enough complexity dealing with their domain not having to add the complexity of their tools to that.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  >Yes I agree. It's hard work. You'd think a trillion dollar personal computing company like Apple would put in that work. As a whole I think software dev culture has tilted a little too far in the direction of developer convenience. It’s our job to make the lives of our users easier, but it’s also very easy to fall into the trap of settling for “good enough”, which leads to the production of software that in reality is just barely hanging on the edge of “good enough”. To hit the moon you need to shoot for the stars so to speak, and as of late we’ve barely even been shooting for the mountaintops.