>"I used to look up to Alan Cooper (who wrote _The Inmates are Running the Asylum_, where _the inmates_ are developers) but now I just loathe him. Programmers g

>"I used to look up to Alan Cooper (who wrote _The Inmates are Running the Asylum_, where _the inmates_ are developers) but now I just loathe him. Programmers get a lot of unwarranted heat for producing unusable interfaces or producing cryptic error messages, but this is because programming requires a tremendous amount of mental effort, and I very much doubt that anybody is able to switch from computer to human oriented thinking instantly." To give Cooper credit his ideas have moved on quite some way since he wrote that book. See this old comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1728957 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1728957 for pointers to some of his more recent thinking.