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> and very possibly the empathy Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about wha

> and very possibly the empathy Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. I can’t imagine forcing students to care about .rc files and whatever’s in /etc. Not to mention the differences between whatever shell is installed by default and the various other shells that are also scripting languages, etc. I’m a veteran programmer in my 50s and this shit is too much for me to care about. I have work to do. Editing text files in vim or Emacs is utterly stupid for most users. It’s not like TextEdit or Notepad don’t do most of what students need without a bunch of cryptic crap involved, or that IDEs wouldn’t allow students to delve into programming much more easily. I just don’t get the cult of Unix. Yes, it’s powerful for a large class of things that programmers like to do. But it’s a terrible OS for normal users. And that won’t change until the people making it and making tools for it grow up and think of someone other than themselves when they write programs.

jancsika 4y ago
> > and very possibly the empathy > Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. It's more likely that designing effective UX is just extremely difficult. I'm guessing it's so difficult that neither the user nor the FOSS developer even know how to define the problem in a lot of cases. E.g., go back and try to find a pre-Google era user asking for streamlined search capability in some Linux application mailing list. Something like, "I just want to type in the thing I'm looking for and find the thing I wanted." IIRC most university library search tools before Google had a few dozen fields to specify the type of data you wanted to search for, and a crappy "keywords" field that often didn't return the desired record. So a student would search by first not finding what they were after, then calling over a librarian to help them choose the correct fields and input strings. I'll rankly speculate that any such discussion on a pre-Google FOSS application user list would have consisted of a developer arguing that such an approach cannot work by providing a set of canned edge-cases with unresolvable ambiguities. And this response would have convinced the user who likely had no idea how the whole search algo works in the first place, or what the potential solutions could look like. Then Google came along. (Well, the Google that exist before the current one which seems to be purposely inserting non-relevant results that a recommendation algo has determined still have a decent chance of engaging the user.) And the FOSS mailing list response tacitly shifted from, "That's probably not a well-formed feature," to, "Patches accepted." I'm not sure what the current response would be, but I doubt it generates a lot of enthusiasm for improving the UX. Hell, even in the well-formed feature requests the implementation details are probably a major pain in the ass. For funsies-- go download the old Gimp that consisted entirely of toplevel windows, and try to figure out the most workable way of converting it a single-window app with subwindows. That's like some kind of demented detention punishment for FOSS devs who break the CoC. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
zinekeller 4y ago
> Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. While I agree with this, it's interesting how Blender basically resisted losing focus on boring-but-important things (while keeping the fun and interesting parts). Probably the fact that Blender was originally planned to be a commercial application.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  I see Blender as a very long running project that got "close enough" to market desires to get industry to see the potential in it and support it. Once the great UI war resulted in 2.8 it has been going great from there. If you could get krita/gimp/whatever "close enough" to market for industry to "see the potential" then maybe similar could happen. Although, for all I know, there is a dark side to the Blender current ways of doing things. But for now it seems fantastic.
  - unsignedint 4y ago
    Blender is unique in the way thet they were not only in the business of developing software, but also creating a film using it. Each of film they produced had certain focus to it, so my understanding is that development process was designed to meet these requirements, and they implemented them in the way artists can use it. (And they perhaps have had very close feedback loop as well.) It also helped 3DCG is relatively niche, at least not the type of a tool that people would expect to be able to use it without learning it considerably. At the same time Blender did make some compromises around the 2.8 version to adopt to more of industry standard UI interactions as opposed to sticking with the their own way of doing
opan 4y ago
Non-programmer here. I love editing in vim and emacs. I hate reading these cookie cutter arguments that supposedly all this stuff is a lot of work or hard to learn. It's much easier than programming is.

jancsika 4y ago

> > and very possibly the empathy > Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. It's more likely that designing effective UX is just extremely difficult. I'm guessing it's so difficult that neither the user nor the FOSS developer even know how to define the problem in a lot of cases. E.g., go back and try to find a pre-Google era user asking for streamlined search capability in some Linux application mailing list. Something like, "I just want to type in the thing I'm looking for and find the thing I wanted." IIRC most university library search tools before Google had a few dozen fields to specify the type of data you wanted to search for, and a crappy "keywords" field that often didn't return the desired record. So a student would search by first not finding what they were after, then calling over a librarian to help them choose the correct fields and input strings. I'll rankly speculate that any such discussion on a pre-Google FOSS application user list would have consisted of a developer arguing that such an approach cannot work by providing a set of canned edge-cases with unresolvable ambiguities. And this response would have convinced the user who likely had no idea how the whole search algo works in the first place, or what the potential solutions could look like. Then Google came along. (Well, the Google that exist before the current one which seems to be purposely inserting non-relevant results that a recommendation algo has determined still have a decent chance of engaging the user.) And the FOSS mailing list response tacitly shifted from, "That's probably not a well-formed feature," to, "Patches accepted." I'm not sure what the current response would be, but I doubt it generates a lot of enthusiasm for improving the UX. Hell, even in the well-formed feature requests the implementation details are probably a major pain in the ass. For funsies-- go download the old Gimp that consisted entirely of toplevel windows, and try to figure out the most workable way of converting it a single-window app with subwindows. That's like some kind of demented detention punishment for FOSS devs who break the CoC. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

zinekeller 4y ago

> Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. While I agree with this, it's interesting how Blender basically resisted losing focus on boring-but-important things (while keeping the fun and interesting parts). Probably the fact that Blender was originally planned to be a commercial application.

_carbyau_ 4y ago
I see Blender as a very long running project that got "close enough" to market desires to get industry to see the potential in it and support it. Once the great UI war resulted in 2.8 it has been going great from there. If you could get krita/gimp/whatever "close enough" to market for industry to "see the potential" then maybe similar could happen. Although, for all I know, there is a dark side to the Blender current ways of doing things. But for now it seems fantastic.
- unsignedint 4y ago
  Blender is unique in the way thet they were not only in the business of developing software, but also creating a film using it. Each of film they produced had certain focus to it, so my understanding is that development process was designed to meet these requirements, and they implemented them in the way artists can use it. (And they perhaps have had very close feedback loop as well.) It also helped 3DCG is relatively niche, at least not the type of a tool that people would expect to be able to use it without learning it considerably. At the same time Blender did make some compromises around the 2.8 version to adopt to more of industry standard UI interactions as opposed to sticking with the their own way of doing

opan 4y ago

Non-programmer here. I love editing in vim and emacs. I hate reading these cookie cutter arguments that supposedly all this stuff is a lot of work or hard to learn. It's much easier than programming is.