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Good Tools Are Invisible

gingerbill.org

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Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#91

Post by zaphar »

sph wrote: post #85
gingerBill wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am afraid the author confuses familiarity with proof that his tools are better. Literally NOT what I was implying or even said anywhere. Quote me where I said anything like that. To quote myself: > What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great. This has nothing to do with why…

People don't use vim because they enjoy puzzle solving. I don't even know how you got this conception. People use vim because they are effective at editing with vim, period, just like you are effective with Sublime Text. People don't use Linux because they enjoy tweaking config files and everybody else has too busy a life to do that. That's a silly misconception and veiled attempt at feeling superior at those time-wa…

I do know quite a few people who use vim because they do enjoy the puzzle. So there are absolutely people as he describes. Saying that there aren't people like that just undermines your point.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#92

Post by abenga »

dhosek wrote: post #88

The Linux on the desktop one was the biggest “hell, yeah” moment for me. 99% of the desktop preference is familiarity. Since my personal computing has been on a Mac exclusively for the last 24 years and I’ve not used Windows for work more recently than 2018 (and it was sporadically the case in the decade before that), when I do use Windows, it feels like I’m typing in molasses. A Linux desktop feels like I’m typing i…

I really don't understand what everyone does that gets in their way on Linux desktop. I install Debian and the packages I use, I open Gnome, I open the software I'm using, I do my work.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#93

Post by lilerjee »

> The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible.

It is because you are already very familiar with and accustomed to this tool.

The main meaning of the author probably is (from one article):

We need to remember that the purpose of using tools is to solve specific problems and achieve goals.

No tool is perfect. When using the useful functions of a tool, we also need to tolerate or ignore some of its shortcomings. Don't seek out or switch to a new tool simply because of some insignificant flaws. In the process of selecting and using tools, don't have the perfectionism, and always keep the goal in mind. The important thing is to master the useful functions of the tools to quickly, effectively, and efficiently complete tasks or goals, thereby significantly improving efficiency and productivity, rather than constantly complaining, switching tools, and wasting time and energy.

For the tools we choose, one must become truly familiar with and proficient in their use, continuously customize, modify, and improve them, and strive to use them to the fullest extent, thereby significantly improving efficiency and productivity, and solving practical problems and achieving goals faster and better.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#94

Post by weitendorf »

You see this a lot with beginners, because until you’ve done the work long enough to truly know what works, you only really know what you have seen through other people’s performance of the work (to the degree it is even understandable and perceptible to you). Also your social circle is probably mostly other beginners or more experienced people who are evaluating you in terms of basic competency/understanding as someone who knows more than a guy off the street who wants to be or claims to be capable of something.

So the costly/difficult-to-fake signaling of competency through complex setups, or tool fluency, has very high personal value because it positions you as someone who is interested and capable of learning about this stuff. And if you don’t have any real work to do yet, or even know what it is all the work is actually done for, it’s the most obvious place to start.

Once you understand this you can start to understand how developer tools marketing actually works, and why “this completely eliminated that problem entirely!” is NOT what developers get excited about paying for or using unless it’s something they/their social peers don’t value. Conversely, if you create a vessel for them to participate in some kind of social trend/signaling game within their social world it stops mattering as much or not it’s more productive or doesn’t actually save any time.

This applies in almost all social systems, if you’re interested in learning more about it some good terms are “costly signaling”, “mechanism design”, and animal psychology. Just don’t let yourself think you’re too smart to do it yourself - it’s inherent to the act of socializing, so anytime you’re doing that, your perceptible behavioral signals are going to affect the outcome, whether you like it or not

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#95

Post by anal_reactor »

jrimbault wrote: post #13

Having designed a good number of internal tools for teams of developers I couldn't agree more. Earlier I had the tendency to "leave the guts" open, thinking my users were developers and would want that. All it did was put obstacles in my teammates actually doing their work. My teammates must use the tools I made for them to achieve work the company needs them to do, they don't want, nor should they want to, fiddle wi…

Some time ago I made an abstraction "hey, most people in our company who use CloudFront don't care about all the implementation details, they just want some paths to be somewhat cached". I explained this idea to a coworker. It took a while, but he understood it. Two months later someone merged a PR that replaced my interface "I want this and this path cached" with a simple passthrough that exposes raw AWS interface. Same thing happened to S3 buckets where I noticed that most people just want "auto-delete files after X days either on or off".

I spent entire year trying to explain to my manager "most devs who create services want a simple deploy button". Instead, we tried to teach devs how our "infrastructure as a code" works so that they'd contribute. The effect was that only one guy engaged with us this way, and he always sent us AI-generated PRs, and every time he saw an error, he just copy-pasted it to ChatGPT without reading and then the answer back to me.

The project eventually shifted towards my original idea, but in an extremely painful way without any design at all. It's just a toolbox of completely random features glued together because one day manager says "no we don't need to support X" and two months later a Jira ticket "add support of X".

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#96

Post by bogwog »

ventana wrote: post #11

As a long time terminal user, it does not surprise me much when people just don't get it . The discussion often goes like this: — In a terminal, I can do so-and-so with a simple command — Well, in my FrobnicatorStudio, there's a shortcut Ctrl+Alt+So for that and this can go forever, going into pretty much useless comparisons like "in vim, I can delete 24 lines by pressing four keys" (no Sublime user ever needs that)…

I've been working with the command line for just under two decades. A couple of years of those were spent with vim as my primary editor, but eventually I moved to Sublime and never looked back.

But I still use the command line heavily in all my work. I usually have a konsole window that I alt+tab into whenever I need to build or run tests, instead of using Sublime's "build system" support. The only time I use vim is when I need to ssh, or am using Termux on my phone.

> The proper argument here, probably, is this one: the terminal, with its way of combining small CLI tools into pipelines, covers infinitely many use cases,

Extensible GUI tools (Sublime, VSCode, etc) cover infinitely many use cases too, except they offer more reliable and reproducible runtime environments.

I think the reason these types of discussions never die is because people in general tend towards closed mindedness. It's hard to put yourself in other people's shoes, and even harder to entertain the possibility that you're wrong.

But at the end of the day this only matters for novices. After enough experience with them, no matter what you use, your productivity bottleneck isn't going to be your tools (unless its ed...).

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#97

Post by jwrallie »

abenga wrote: post #92
dhosek wrote: post #88

The Linux on the desktop one was the biggest “hell, yeah” moment for me. 99% of the desktop preference is familiarity. Since my personal computing has been on a Mac exclusively for the last 24 years and I’ve not used Windows for work more recently than 2018 (and it was sporadically the case in the decade before that), when I do use Windows, it feels like I’m typing in molasses. A Linux desktop feels like I’m typing i…

I really don't understand what everyone does that gets in their way on Linux desktop. I install Debian and the packages I use, I open Gnome, I open the software I'm using, I do my work.

Exactly, not everyone is using Arch, btw. Fedora with Gnome just work to the point it is boring.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#98

Post by ventana »

MrManatee wrote: post #89
ventana wrote: post #11

As a long time terminal user, it does not surprise me much when people just don't get it . The discussion often goes like this: — In a terminal, I can do so-and-so with a simple command — Well, in my FrobnicatorStudio, there's a shortcut Ctrl+Alt+So for that and this can go forever, going into pretty much useless comparisons like "in vim, I can delete 24 lines by pressing four keys" (no Sublime user ever needs that)…

If we make a distinction between CLI apps and TUI apps, my interpretation is that the article was specifically talking about the latter. By a CLI app (with the emphasis on command line ) I mean something like grep, sort, cp, git, ls, tar, etc. The normal way of interacting with these is by writing commands on the shell, which means that if you know how to use it normally, you can also use it in a script. Which means…

Agreed about the difference between CLI and TUI; at the same time, I do indeed prefer TUI over the “normal” (window) GUI apps for the exact reason why I would prefer vim (or emacs for the other half) over a GUI editor: when you are already in the terminal, launching a TUI app is just faster than switching to a GUI window. So it's still about "terminal or not" for me, or even, what is your default starting point: is it a desktop with icons or menus, or a command line with a prompt? For me it's a terminal, so I prefer TUI apps.

...but not Midnight Commander: it's an outlier in your list, a tool that actively prevents you from learning the way how things work in terminal. Same for all attempts to invent a UI for git.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#99

Post by gingerBill »

sph wrote: post #85
gingerBill wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am afraid the author confuses familiarity with proof that his tools are better. Literally NOT what I was implying or even said anywhere. Quote me where I said anything like that. To quote myself: > What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great. This has nothing to do with why…

People don't use vim because they enjoy puzzle solving. I don't even know how you got this conception. People use vim because they are effective at editing with vim, period, just like you are effective with Sublime Text. People don't use Linux because they enjoy tweaking config files and everybody else has too busy a life to do that. That's a silly misconception and veiled attempt at feeling superior at those time-wa…

> People don't use vim because they enjoy puzzle solving.

I didn't say that either nor even imply it, and you know that when you quote me afterwards. So huh?!?!

> People don't use Linux because they enjoy tweaking config files and everybody else has too busy a life to do that.

A lot of people, including younger myself, got into Linux and Android BECAUSE it was configurable and customizable. And even played around with all of the customizations because it was fun to do. But it didn't really make my general experience better because I was forever trying to correct something I should have to correct in the first place.

I am not sure how much clearer I can be in the article or in my replies to comments.

Re: Good Tools Are Invisible

#100

Post by bluGill »

hrombach wrote: post #31
bluGill wrote: post #15

> usually because they don’t realize how much more productive keyboard navigation is than reaching for the mouse a lot of the time. In a large number of cases people who say they are more productive have never measured it. They have no idea if it is true. There are been many competitions between keyboard and mouse navigation over the years. Depending on the details of how the test is written one will win or the other…

I think if you need to measure this kind of thing, you're missing the point in the first place. I don't want to be chasing some absolute productivity metric, I want a setup that doesn't break my flow. For many people, reaching for the mouse breaks their flow and feels wrong, which is oftentimes worse than being a second slower, because it takes you out of the mental frame you were in. For me, using my mouse while I'm…

Reaching for the mouse doesn't break my flow. It makes the thing I was doing invisible in the flow. Keyboard shortcuts require me to think, which makes it FEEL like I'm doing something, and that something is in the flow so it feels like I'm productive. However the mouse doesn't even enter into the flow at all, I just do the thing and get on with the real work without breaking flow.

Again, there is no universal correct answer. Sometimes the keyboard really is better. However sometimes the mouse really is better and because I'm proficient in it I don't break my flow to use it.

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