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>Would love to hear why people think this is a non-issue. Most developers have never seen anything better. They start working within an artificially complicate
by gambler 8y ago
>Would love to hear why people think this is a non-issue.
Most developers have never seen anything better. They start working within an artificially complicated ecosystem, get used to it and perpetuate all of the assumptions the ecosystem makes when they create their own products.
And when you point this out, most people just get angry, because for them it suggests they have been doing something wrong for as long as they've done engineering. This is why you always hear things like "buy my website is an application" or "but it has to be complicated to use, because it had complicated functionality".
Simplicity is not easy or intuitive.
I've only started to learn the principles of designing simple systems that do complex things around 10-12 years in my career, after accidentally discovering certain people's talks online (Alan Kay, Rich Hickey) and learning a bit about old-school AI systems. Most people aren't familiar with any of that stuff and don't really care.
One thing I personally cannot comprehend is why web applications are almost universally installed and managed through command line, rather than web interfaces. The only advantage of a command-line interface is pipe chaining, and it's never uses installation/configuration. There is nothing fundamental about command line. It's just a software simulation of a teletype terminal.
- duggan 8y agoThe command line has the advantage of presenting portable, terse and editable instructions that can be cobbled together into a recipe which can be abstracted and automated. It's a very powerful interface.
- gambler 8y agoWeb interfaces are used by half the population of the planet. Any command you run in a shell can be represented by a URL, an HTML tag or a form. URLs and HTML have editable text representations, and they also have semantics, standard composition rules and generic UI. Any "recipe" you're getting is likely something you get from a web page to begin with. That can be a tool for composition and automation on it own.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kaishiro 8y agoSo very few of those web interfaces used by half the population of the planet actually utilize semantics, standard composition rules, and generic UIs - even though they're available.
- craftyguy 8y ago> Any "recipe" you're getting Not necessarily. Distro package maintainers use and construct recipes that are not web pages, in order to allow folks to install complex software with, in many cases, one click.
- tome 8y ago> cannot comprehend is why web applications are almost universally installed and managed through command line, rather than web interfaces. The only advantage of a command-line interface is pipe chaining Repeatability, scriptability, debugability ... ?