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I absolutely am, because the thought it inspires is: "can I make this easier to use / harder to use wrong?" UI/UX/HCI matters, and sometimes the people who bui

• kragen 3y ago
  hci matters a great deal, yes, but you're applying more charity to the reading of this comic than unicef's annual budget can cover. what it actually says is that intellectually hard things aren't worth doing because attempting them creates more problems than it solves, which is a pernicious message, and a very tempting one to make your reading plausible, you have to add the subtext 'and it's all the fault of the person who thought up the hard thing, anyway,' and i think that subtext is just as pernicious as the explicit message; it presupposes that all intellectual problems are in some sense as artificial as school grades, and so it's especially tempting to people whose main experience of intellectual challenges is in the context of school grades. and of course knowledge is very, very frequently used as a mere shibboleth, an ingroup marker rather than a toy or a tool; subjectsigma's [flagged] [dead] example of juvenile slang in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39538748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39538748 is just one of innumerable examples. that is another thing that makes this pernicious message so tempting making hard things easier to do, and easier to do right, is very worthwhile; but in order to do that, you have to learn to do the hard thing in the first place, usually several hard things. for that, either you need to figure them out yourself, be lucky enough to have a mentor to guide you, or read the kind of manual which starts with 'how to read this manual', usually known as a 'textbook', 'paper', or 'standards document'. what's even harder than reading a textbook is that you have to do the exercises so at best this kind of rhetoric is the intellectual equivalent of pulling up the rope ladder after you into the clubhouse, discouraging hoi polloi from learning the skills you've found valuable; at worst, and all too often, it's khmer-rouge-style assignment of mortal culpability to anyone who looks too nerdy i agree that c compilers have better error messages than they used to, and rust's error messages are very good. but this comic still classes the rust compiler as a tool that creates far more problems than it solves, because its manual starts with a section entitled 'how to use this book': https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch00-00-introduction.html#how-to-use-this-book https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch00-00-introduction.html#how... as i read it, the comic harshly condemns any artifact that can only be used effectively by people who are willing to put significant effort into learning, which covers c compilers, the rust compiler, and the lengthy catalog of artifacts i listed above i don't think that attitude is praiseworthy (and you don't seem to think so either, instead disagreeing with my reading; i'm interested to hear if i'm wrong)
  • dgacmu 3y ago
    I disagree with your reading; I don't disagree that there are good things out there that require reading the manual and reading the "how to use this manual" section. But I think your reading is the most uncharitable possible reading of a comic. It's art and humor, and any reading of the author's other material makes it clear he's a fan of doing hard things. Taken in context, I believe it's quite clear he's trying to make a point about usability, and doing so in a very broad-brush way because the simplicity of the comic format requires that. I'm a CS professor. I teach people to read the man pages. I encourage them to read books, and to learn how to use the tools they use. I teach them to use git. And every time I teach them to use git, I want to hit myself on the head with a board, because while it solves a lot of problems, it _creates its own problems_ as well, and mostly in ways that are an unnecessary result of terrible ux.
    • kragen 3y ago
      thank you for explaining your perspective! my reading of his work is that he gave up on doing intellectually challenging things when his wife got cancer (though not, of course, on doing hard things in general) and, like backus, regretted much of the time he'd spent on them. even his earlier work betrays substantial ambivalence about whether his youthful pleasures in mathematics and physics were really praiseworthy—perhaps partly animated by acute awareness of the privilege he was enjoying by being able to spend his time playing with such delightful ideas, and by his deep egalitarian impulses, impulses which lead many people to instinctively reject the idea of a laudable calling only accessible to (or enjoyable by) a small, privileged group but ultimately the meaning of a piece of art is not contingent on the life circumstances of the artist (have you read pierre menard, autor del quijote? it's short and delightful) but socially constructed by a public who reads their own meanings into the work. and mostly single-panel comics are not read in the context of the author's overall œuvre; they go viral on tiktok, facebook, and twitter, or they're flashed on the projection screen during a classroom lecture, in both cases profoundly stripped of context. what determines their interpretation is the culture that reads them. despite his own remarkable scholarship, wagner and his operas came to symbolize the most anti-intellectual sort of violence and brutality, in large part not because of his own antisemitism, but because of the role it played in the broader context of german culture at the dawn of the authoritarian age i agree that git has terrible ux, and that it could have had better ux. (it's like the unix filesystem in that way; i've had major unix filesystem data loss events twice in my life, due to user errors that a better filesystem design could have prevented, a number that would have been much higher without, ironically!, git.) and i also think that in general every solution we invent does create its own problems, though i agree with you that we can make those problems more or less severe by the design choices we make, and we should work hard at making them less severe but i suspect that students who read that comic will have a lower success rate at overcoming those problems and realizing their own designs than students who don't—hopefully only by a small amount