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A nuance to this is musical instruments are designed to not change. That's a blessing in most aspects, but wouldn't fit with most of our work. I assumed for a

A nuance to this is musical instruments are designed to not change. That's a blessing in most aspects, but wouldn't fit with most of our work. I assumed for a while that our job, being to basically type in documents, would see very little interface change. And in practice some people are still rocking their fullscreen Vim/emacs setup. But most of us use a ton more tools, have yhem integrated into our workflows and our coding interface looks more often than not like a plane cockpit than a piano keyboard. Same for drawing, it feels like it could be done with a pencil and a blank canvas, but looking at pros it's a flurry of input devices/buttons, dials, with tons of UI to assist them.

skydhash 3y ago
> A nuance to this is musical instruments are designed to not change. That's a blessing in most aspects, but wouldn't fit with most of our work. Our tools could be designed not to change too if there were some convention they abide. Things like project configuration, linting, debugging, formatting, code analysis and navigation. IDEs are great because of this, but they only support a handful of project types and languages.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  > Our tools could be designed not to change too if there were some convention they abide. I'm with you on the possibility, with the underlying assumption that we won't make any significant changes to our tools down the line. On the piano example, electronic keyboards for instance look nothing like grand pianos, they come with external input, have a flurry of options and their whole interface is cryptic without the specific manual for the keyboard in front of you. There's the anecdote of the guy feeding Roland manuals to a LLM to then query for specific configuration options. I think at some point there will be programmers on the side of "we have a fixed configuration that doesn't need to evolve anymore" grand piano style (I guess the people working on COBOL could be already there ?), and the rest of us more on the electronic piano side, embracing the chaos to get a more cutting edge technology.

skydhash 3y ago

> A nuance to this is musical instruments are designed to not change. That's a blessing in most aspects, but wouldn't fit with most of our work. Our tools could be designed not to change too if there were some convention they abide. Things like project configuration, linting, debugging, formatting, code analysis and navigation. IDEs are great because of this, but they only support a handful of project types and languages.

makeitdouble 3y ago
> Our tools could be designed not to change too if there were some convention they abide. I'm with you on the possibility, with the underlying assumption that we won't make any significant changes to our tools down the line. On the piano example, electronic keyboards for instance look nothing like grand pianos, they come with external input, have a flurry of options and their whole interface is cryptic without the specific manual for the keyboard in front of you. There's the anecdote of the guy feeding Roland manuals to a LLM to then query for specific configuration options. I think at some point there will be programmers on the side of "we have a fixed configuration that doesn't need to evolve anymore" grand piano style (I guess the people working on COBOL could be already there ?), and the rest of us more on the electronic piano side, embracing the chaos to get a more cutting edge technology.