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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" sec

• 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