4 ms·

This comprehensive, developer focused eco system has been promised again and again. The challenge is that those metaphors take a long time to create and are fra

This comprehensive, developer focused eco system has been promised again and again. The challenge is that those metaphors take a long time to create and are fragile. A new need arises or the paradigm shifts and all that equity evaporates. In the early 2000's there were promises that we were on the verge of graphical programming. Environments where anyone could stitch programs together visually. They turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. Anything sufficiently complicated needed a proficient software engineer. That engineer inevitably did away with cumbersome graphical tool preferring to just write the code. The tasks that non-software engineers were able to work were of questionable value to begin with. Personally I prefer the patchwork. Emerging from the java, .NET bubble was a breath of fresh air for me. I considered the IDE to be constraining. It did 90% of what I needed but I also needed to do the other 10%. Simplicity always trumps completeness and composition is always better.

lbriner 6y ago
Another example is early implementations of Visual Studio GUI designer. It was much easier for them to produce this using a new magic code that we didn't have to interact with but which quickly became passe and required some understanding when debugging. Once they were able to produce forms using code, the old method just went away and everything changed again. I don't feel that we lack the tooling to be as slick as we want, we lack the motivation to invest the time and money to make things slicker. It worked at Apple, not because of integrated tooling, but because of a dictator-style management that forced people to collaborate in the name of quality. Perhaps what we are uncomfortable with is the idea that high quality requires that level of control!?

4 ms·

This comprehensive, developer focused eco system has been promised again and again. The challenge is that those metaphors take a long time to create and are fra

by SassyGrapefruit 6y ago

lbriner 6y ago
Another example is early implementations of Visual Studio GUI designer. It was much easier for them to produce this using a new magic code that we didn't have to interact with but which quickly became passe and required some understanding when debugging. Once they were able to produce forms using code, the old method just went away and everything changed again. I don't feel that we lack the tooling to be as slick as we want, we lack the motivation to invest the time and money to make things slicker. It worked at Apple, not because of integrated tooling, but because of a dictator-style management that forced people to collaborate in the name of quality. Perhaps what we are uncomfortable with is the idea that high quality requires that level of control!?