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Tools should be designed to fit with humans; the goal is to minimize how much humans have to contort themselves to fit their tools. There'll always be some deg

• smsm42 13y ago
  That's fine. People have different needs and preferences. Some drive Honda Accord, some drive BMW convertible and some drive GMC truck. It's just looks a little silly when Accord driver comes out and starts pronouncing that trucks are absolutely useless and he has deep visceral hate with anything that ugly stupid space at the back that nobody ever needs and millions of people that buy trucks are actually idiots just incapable of driving a clearly superior Accord.
  • eevee 13y ago
    I'm not sure how to reconcile this analogy with the existence of government programs (carpool lanes, tax incentives for hybrids) that encourage the use of more efficient cars with more people in them, on the grounds that it's better overall for the ecosystem.
    • smsm42 13y ago
      I sincerely hope you don't imply you'd like government coercion to be used on people "for their own good" when they choose what tool to use for their purposes. Or for the government bureaucrats to select winners in software world and facilitate wealth transfer from actually popular tools to those that are only viable as beneficiaries of government coercion.
      • vectorpush 13y ago
        I think his point is that the truck analogy doesn't favor PHP when he considers that society has made an effort to reduce the use of trucks due to their general inefficiency compared to sedans. I think the analogy fails because trucks and sedans are different tools for different purposes (one is better for transporting people, one is better for transporting cargo), while PHP and Ruby pretty much do the same thing, one is just prettier and streamlined.
        • smsm42 13y ago
          >>> while PHP and Ruby pretty much do the same thing Says who? >>> one is just prettier and streamlined. By which objective measure of "prettier" and "streamlined"?
          • vectorpush 13y ago
            Says who? Says the fact that PHP and Ruby are both object oriented imperative scripting languages that are commonly used for connecting to a DB and spitting out markup. It's impossible to shove a refrigerator into the back of a sedan, but there is no analogous refrigerator that PHP xor Ruby is incapable of hauling. By which objective measure of "prettier" and "streamlined"? Well it is subjective, but the nebulous consensus is that Ruby has a cleaner and more readable syntax than PHP.
            • smsm42 13y ago
              Any Turing-complete language can do any computational task that is computable by Turing-complete languages, so by that criteria every language is the same. Obviously, in practice they are not. >>> Well it is subjective, but the nebulous consensus is that Ruby has a cleaner and more readable syntax than PHP. Consensus of whom? "Nobody I know voted for him", right?
              • vectorpush 13y ago
                Any Turing-complete language can do any computational task that is computable by Turing-complete languages, so by that criteria every language is the same. Obviously, in practice they are not. That's a straw man, I didn't use that as a criteria. PHP and Ruby are both object oriented imperative scripting languages that are commonly used for connecting to a DB and spitting out markup See that? That's me describing specific qualities of the languages that make them similar. Of course, you could use Ruby or PHP to write a graphics engine (in fact, I have done so with Ruby), but that is not a common use case. Most of the time, Ruby and PHP are used to solve the same set of problems: scripting server-side logic for the web. Consensus of whom? The internet? The programming community? That's why I used the "nebulous" qualifier. I'm not saying it's a fact, but it's a pretty popular sentiment which is about as solid as it gets with regard to matters of taste. Yes, PHP and Ruby are different, but most of the time they are used to do the same thing.