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> Big sprawling systems with lots of options and special cases excel at providing #1. This is the sales pitch, but in reality you spend so much time configurin

by wyager 5y ago

> Big sprawling systems with lots of options and special cases excel at providing #1. This is the sales pitch, but in reality you spend so much time configuring and debugging that you rarely actually save any time.

munificent 5y ago
> in reality you spend so much time configuring and debugging that you rarely actually save any time. Conversely, that's the sales pitch for minimalism. But the reality is that well-intentioned, thoughtful designers and users seem to end up spending most of their time building and using systems with a lot of complexity. If it really ended up costing them more time to use those systems, it begs the question of why we keep building them.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  > it begs the question of why we keep building them. It's harder to build a minimal system which fits users' needs like a glove, than to stuff in options to fit each new issue discovered. So developers build complex systems (eg. I built corrscope's arcane settings system), often because they don't know the domain well enough to design a clean elegant solution with the right abstractions. But the resulting complex configuration system is harder to learn and use than the ideal solution (which may exist, may be possible to build, or may be impossible). Though minimal systems aren't always viable either, when different users may want different programs. Some people want MS Word for its WordArt, some people want tables of contents, some people want something like Markdown, some people want change tracking. Some people want Vim, some people want Emacs, some people want Notepad++, some people want an IDE. I want tabs in a terminal emulator, because I don't want to throw out my knowledge of stacking WMs which don't have tabs (I don't know why not, BeOS and Haiku are stacking WMs with tabs), and learn a tiling WM with tabs.

by wyager 5y ago

munificent 5y ago

> in reality you spend so much time configuring and debugging that you rarely actually save any time. Conversely, that's the sales pitch for minimalism. But the reality is that well-intentioned, thoughtful designers and users seem to end up spending most of their time building and using systems with a lot of complexity. If it really ended up costing them more time to use those systems, it begs the question of why we keep building them.

nyanpasu64 5y ago
> it begs the question of why we keep building them. It's harder to build a minimal system which fits users' needs like a glove, than to stuff in options to fit each new issue discovered. So developers build complex systems (eg. I built corrscope's arcane settings system), often because they don't know the domain well enough to design a clean elegant solution with the right abstractions. But the resulting complex configuration system is harder to learn and use than the ideal solution (which may exist, may be possible to build, or may be impossible). Though minimal systems aren't always viable either, when different users may want different programs. Some people want MS Word for its WordArt, some people want tables of contents, some people want something like Markdown, some people want change tracking. Some people want Vim, some people want Emacs, some people want Notepad++, some people want an IDE. I want tabs in a terminal emulator, because I don't want to throw out my knowledge of stacking WMs which don't have tabs (I don't know why not, BeOS and Haiku are stacking WMs with tabs), and learn a tiling WM with tabs.