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I just wanted to mention that I really liked this article/slides, and agree that most software sucks... ... but I think the systems built "by hackers for hacke

by ploxiln 11y ago

I just wanted to mention that I really liked this article/slides, and agree that most software sucks... ... but I think the systems built "by hackers for hackers", nix clones in general and linux distributions in particular, are generally the best stuff out there. It's all the attempts to be "intuitive" and "easy" and "just work" that really fails. It's the stuff "by designers for users" that sucks. The old-ish core unix/linux stuff has been slowly polished over the years and works pretty damn well, and you depend on its quiet stable operation for all your fancy user-friendly (and "dev-friendly") layers that need to be completely replaced every couple of years, for your favorite phone and your favorite websites. EDIT: you complain about trying to compile kdevelop, on ubuntu... well there's your mistake, both of those things are trying hard to be user-friendly. Try plain debian, plain vim, etc.

klum 11y ago
There's a quote by someone (Steve Jobs?) to the effect that there are three phases of understanding a problem: first, you don't understand it; second, you research it and come up with all kinds of complicated solutions and, third, you really understand the problem and you can find a solution which is elegant and actually works. This is oversimplified, but I think most of the things today that try to be user-friendly and intuitive are stuck in the second phase--it takes a lot of effort and care to get to the third one. The iPhone interface (touch, swiping, ...) might actually be an example of a successful attempt at the "just works"-category--we've all heard of babies learning to navigate iPads etc. And today it seems so obvious, you don't even think about all the nuances that have to be right for this to work, but that's probably a hallmark of the designs that really are intuitive--they seem so obvious you don't immediately realize someone had to come up with them, and iterate on them until they just worked.
- chipsy 11y ago
  There's definitely a learning curve involved. UX improvements tend to follow an arc from "configure everything, expose everything" towards "a bit too crude for power users, but 99% of use-cases are automated, defaulted, and profiled into nothing". Hacker personalities tend to fall into conflict with that ambition(even if they enjoy the results) since "hackability factor" is dependent on having something to configure, and you can't configure a nothing that just works - especially since in the space between "configure everything" and "just works", you have a form of the uncanny valley effect where the experience gets a lot worse and there is no possibility to configure yourself out of it. That stops UX from enjoying simple incremental improvements.
  - jefurii 11y ago
    > "configure everything, expose everything" The very UNIX-y solution is to have a nice, simple, friendly UI on top of the infinitely-configurable command-line engine. Or better yet, two different friendly UIs and you choose which one you like better.
    - groby_b 11y ago
      And that's what got us into the mess we're in, because by now there are 754 friendly UIs, and choosing which one you like better is draining your soul. You. Don't. Want. Infinitely. Configurable. What you do want is lots of simple, friendly tools with limited configurability that you can connect to solve larger issues. To compare it to language, you don't want to have two great novels that are paths through "choose your own adventure". You want words that work together, that are composable according to well-understood, simple rules. Whenever a system like that comes along (unix pipes, REST APIs), people can build amazing things on top of that. The infinitely configurable hypercomplex thing idea gives you XSL:FO, XSLT, the W3C, C++, and assorted fun.
      - plonh 11y ago
        I don't limited configurability tool that doesn't have an option for my particular monitor's resolution.
- dasil003 11y ago
  But there's also the quote that successful complex systems only evolve from simple systems. Steve Jobs solution was to make a simple 80% solution. And of course that works in the consumer market for a great many things, particularly innovative new products. However some things are irreducibly complex and still require a solution. In these cases visionaries fail us, and what we need it is practical iteration to get us a working solution. The end result is always ugly, but it works. Until we have bigger brains I don't see how we can avoid this fundamental limitation in our ability to build systems.
  - klum 11y ago
    Sure, but I still think you can make things intuitive--just not to some random person on the street but to someone with the requisite domain knowledge. At least, that's what I like to think. Relatively speaking, humans have been thinking about interaction with computers for a very short time, so maybe there's hope in the future :).
_yosefk 11y ago
Erm... I sort of figured it out years and years ago, and I do work in plain vim. (Hence to me there's no difference whatsoever between one Linux distro and another, because in any case I can only get plain vim and plain grep to work and not much else. So I won't reply wrt Debian vs Ubuntu except that the other standard reply that I get apart from "running old software" being wrong is, I always seem to be using the wrong distribution. I think the one thing that unites all the distros is that each of them is always the wrong one...) The difference is that on Windows I can run VS just as easily as I can run vim.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  One time I wanted to edit and compile a large open source application on windows... can't just run a build, have to open the project file in VS... VS has to index the source code for intellisense, slows down the whole interface and uses a full gig of memory, and I haven't started a build yet... Really, I'm just quite biased against windows in particular, because I had only Windows 98 and Windows XP when I first came of the age to have and tinker with my own computer, and the amount of stuff that you can't control and can't fix (installing common software, networking, file sharing, drivers) is infuriating. If something only runs on Windows, that's it's biggest flaw. EDIT it's an easy potshot so I'll throw in this link http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2156195-fix-260-character-file-name-length-limitation http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...
  - vitd 11y ago
    Well, I've had the opposite experience. I wanted to build a basic open source package for unix on my Mac. I got the source and followed the instructions to "make whatever". It failed with highly cryptic errors that I later learned through lots of searching meant there were dependencies on other open source projects I didn't have, and all of which had the same sort of dependency problems of their own, and some of which didn't have the proper config files for building on a Mac. I gave up. But honestly all of that misses the point. The article is talking about typical users, not developers. Building stuff is far beyond people who don't know what a browser cookie is.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Unix is great, but it seems like it has killed off a lot of hackers' imaginations. Hell, we haven't even iterated on Unix all that much since System III, not even something like Sprite, Spring or Amoeba. "Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20." -- Boyd Roberts
- dangerlibrary 11y ago
  s/retarded/delayed the need for/g -- sed, awk, and their friends.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  " We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. " -- Rob Pike on his Slashdot interview
  - iopq 11y ago
    "That's why I created a language that feels like it was made 30 years ago"
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    And a hammer is perhaps as old as humanity.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Just because Unix is a hammer doesn't mean you shouldn't use or build jackhammers.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        Right tool for the job though. And all to often the attitude is that the jackhammer is always better because it is newer.
shkkmo 11y ago
So the solution is to find ways to further democratize hacking and allow people to build the tools they need.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
It's the Ned Flanders of the hacker world that are to blame for much of this awful software.
nmesse 11y ago
Exactly. Ubuntu is the worst offender of nix based "Easy" systems. By trying to make an uncomplicated system, they have instead done exactly what all these other cr*py systems have done. Made things more complicated.

by ploxiln 11y ago

klum 11y ago

There's a quote by someone (Steve Jobs?) to the effect that there are three phases of understanding a problem: first, you don't understand it; second, you research it and come up with all kinds of complicated solutions and, third, you really understand the problem and you can find a solution which is elegant and actually works. This is oversimplified, but I think most of the things today that try to be user-friendly and intuitive are stuck in the second phase--it takes a lot of effort and care to get to the third one. The iPhone interface (touch, swiping, ...) might actually be an example of a successful attempt at the "just works"-category--we've all heard of babies learning to navigate iPads etc. And today it seems so obvious, you don't even think about all the nuances that have to be right for this to work, but that's probably a hallmark of the designs that really are intuitive--they seem so obvious you don't immediately realize someone had to come up with them, and iterate on them until they just worked.

chipsy 11y ago
There's definitely a learning curve involved. UX improvements tend to follow an arc from "configure everything, expose everything" towards "a bit too crude for power users, but 99% of use-cases are automated, defaulted, and profiled into nothing". Hacker personalities tend to fall into conflict with that ambition(even if they enjoy the results) since "hackability factor" is dependent on having something to configure, and you can't configure a nothing that just works - especially since in the space between "configure everything" and "just works", you have a form of the uncanny valley effect where the experience gets a lot worse and there is no possibility to configure yourself out of it. That stops UX from enjoying simple incremental improvements.
- jefurii 11y ago
  > "configure everything, expose everything" The very UNIX-y solution is to have a nice, simple, friendly UI on top of the infinitely-configurable command-line engine. Or better yet, two different friendly UIs and you choose which one you like better.
  - groby_b 11y ago
    And that's what got us into the mess we're in, because by now there are 754 friendly UIs, and choosing which one you like better is draining your soul. You. Don't. Want. Infinitely. Configurable. What you do want is lots of simple, friendly tools with limited configurability that you can connect to solve larger issues. To compare it to language, you don't want to have two great novels that are paths through "choose your own adventure". You want words that work together, that are composable according to well-understood, simple rules. Whenever a system like that comes along (unix pipes, REST APIs), people can build amazing things on top of that. The infinitely configurable hypercomplex thing idea gives you XSL:FO, XSLT, the W3C, C++, and assorted fun.
    - plonh 11y ago
      I don't limited configurability tool that doesn't have an option for my particular monitor's resolution.
dasil003 11y ago
But there's also the quote that successful complex systems only evolve from simple systems. Steve Jobs solution was to make a simple 80% solution. And of course that works in the consumer market for a great many things, particularly innovative new products. However some things are irreducibly complex and still require a solution. In these cases visionaries fail us, and what we need it is practical iteration to get us a working solution. The end result is always ugly, but it works. Until we have bigger brains I don't see how we can avoid this fundamental limitation in our ability to build systems.
- klum 11y ago
  Sure, but I still think you can make things intuitive--just not to some random person on the street but to someone with the requisite domain knowledge. At least, that's what I like to think. Relatively speaking, humans have been thinking about interaction with computers for a very short time, so maybe there's hope in the future :).

_yosefk 11y ago

Erm... I sort of figured it out years and years ago, and I do work in plain vim. (Hence to me there's no difference whatsoever between one Linux distro and another, because in any case I can only get plain vim and plain grep to work and not much else. So I won't reply wrt Debian vs Ubuntu except that the other standard reply that I get apart from "running old software" being wrong is, I always seem to be using the wrong distribution. I think the one thing that unites all the distros is that each of them is always the wrong one...) The difference is that on Windows I can run VS just as easily as I can run vim.

ploxiln 11y ago
One time I wanted to edit and compile a large open source application on windows... can't just run a build, have to open the project file in VS... VS has to index the source code for intellisense, slows down the whole interface and uses a full gig of memory, and I haven't started a build yet... Really, I'm just quite biased against windows in particular, because I had only Windows 98 and Windows XP when I first came of the age to have and tinker with my own computer, and the amount of stuff that you can't control and can't fix (installing common software, networking, file sharing, drivers) is infuriating. If something only runs on Windows, that's it's biggest flaw. EDIT it's an easy potshot so I'll throw in this link http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2156195-fix-260-character-file-name-length-limitation http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...
- vitd 11y ago
  Well, I've had the opposite experience. I wanted to build a basic open source package for unix on my Mac. I got the source and followed the instructions to "make whatever". It failed with highly cryptic errors that I later learned through lots of searching meant there were dependencies on other open source projects I didn't have, and all of which had the same sort of dependency problems of their own, and some of which didn't have the proper config files for building on a Mac. I gave up. But honestly all of that misses the point. The article is talking about typical users, not developers. Building stuff is far beyond people who don't know what a browser cookie is.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Unix is great, but it seems like it has killed off a lot of hackers' imaginations. Hell, we haven't even iterated on Unix all that much since System III, not even something like Sprite, Spring or Amoeba. "Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20." -- Boyd Roberts

dangerlibrary 11y ago
s/retarded/delayed the need for/g -- sed, awk, and their friends.
pjmlp 11y ago
" We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. " -- Rob Pike on his Slashdot interview
- iopq 11y ago
  "That's why I created a language that feels like it was made 30 years ago"
- digi_owl 11y ago
  And a hammer is perhaps as old as humanity.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Just because Unix is a hammer doesn't mean you shouldn't use or build jackhammers.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Right tool for the job though. And all to often the attitude is that the jackhammer is always better because it is newer.

shkkmo 11y ago

So the solution is to find ways to further democratize hacking and allow people to build the tools they need.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

It's the Ned Flanders of the hacker world that are to blame for much of this awful software.

nmesse 11y ago

Exactly. Ubuntu is the worst offender of nix based "Easy" systems. By trying to make an uncomplicated system, they have instead done exactly what all these other cr*py systems have done. Made things more complicated.