[flagged]
Good Tools Are Invisible
181–190 of 305 posts
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#182Having 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…
it really depends on the framing, some work, especially fun work that develops skills is more valuable than people realize. From an org perspective the goal is to create the highest curve of performance over the lifetime engagement of the employee or from the employee perspective their career. And a lot of that depends on teh relationship of the people involved. From my perspective its a net negative when if my mover…
Some work is also less valuable than people - especially hackers - realise.
Hackers have an addiction to tractable problems that require effort and some skill, but have a well-defined solution.
They don't require true originality or cleverness. Barrelling through them with adequate but not outstanding skills is more than enough.
Hacker systems like Linux, Vim, and Emacs, offer exactly this. You can tinker with them to solve consecutive microproblems in a satisfying way. Likewise other standard projects like working with vintage hardware or repurposing a consumer product to do something interesting.
This kind of work generates dopamine, where spending four days trying to track down an incredibly subtle bug in a giant stack owned by a few tens of people generates frustration.
So it's not that employees don't care, it's because some work really is hard and frustrating, and solving tractable problems is far easier and more satisfying.
But is it productive? Even educationally? Not necessarily.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#183As 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…
You should not underestimate how confusing those CLI tools are to people who have never used them before.
For example, I would argue that for someone with no experience, figuring out how to copy a file from one folder to another is easier in Windows Explorer than learning how to use cp.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#184Having 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…
And before any major change, add a `--v2` for early adopters and `--v1` as default. Nobody should notice anything on `--v1`, any regression must be fixed imediately. Flip `--v2` as default, leaving `--v1` for the unforseen. Until you can finally get rid of them. This helps being as invisible as possible.
Excellent idea; it's good practice to do that with APIs, so why not with command-line tools as well?
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#185I am afraid the author confuses familiarity with proof that his tools are better. The reality is that every tool has a trade off, and if a user prefers tool X compared to tool Y, it’s not because they are dumb, but likely they make better use of the affordances of that tool that only a power user would get. Give a developer 10 years each with vim, emacs and Sublime Text, they wouldn’t be so sure which is better. [1]…
[deleted]
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#186I am afraid the author confuses familiarity with proof that his tools are better. The reality is that every tool has a trade off, and if a user prefers tool X compared to tool Y, it’s not because they are dumb, but likely they make better use of the affordances of that tool that only a power user would get. Give a developer 10 years each with vim, emacs and Sublime Text, they wouldn’t be so sure which is better. [1]…
The article does say this...
If people find vim, emacs, or whatever genuinely good and productive, I’m not going to criticize them for using it. People are most comfortable with what they know. But for the people I am discussing, that same familiarity blinds them to their tools’ flaws, and leads them to celebrate those flaws, flaunting them as games.
Vim, not so much, maybe I don't know enough who use vim besides myself.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Most knowledge about human computer interfaces was obtained through metrics. Groupings, menu bars, corner buttons, context menu orderings, and other things didn't just spawn into existence. There was a time where human pattern recognition and physiology was an active consideration for user interfaces. One of the reasons mouse input became popular is precisely because interfaces were created to be easy to use with it.…
> "I'd wager that if actually tested,"
https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ - """The widely cited studies on mouse vs. keyboard efficiency are completely bogus ... When I look at various tasks myself, the results are mixed, and they’re mixed in the way that most programmers I polled predicted. This result is so boring that it would barely be worth mentioning if not for the large groups of people who believe that either the keyboard is always faster than the mouse or vice versa."""
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone describe vim as a puzzle that's fun to solve. Search for “vim puzzle” and you’ll find entire websites dedicated to it. Here’s a random one: https://vimventure.dev/
Specific enthusiasts enjoying something is different from telling beginners that "vim is a fun puzzle to solve".
My intro to vim was a guy using some kind of web browser in vim, or maybe it was a browser with vim controls, and I was like wtf. But I did end up using vim for just code/text editing without any fancy macros, it was worth.
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
[flagged]
Re: Good Tools Are Invisible
#190Well this is a take. It’s weird how much the author fixates on Vim being “visible” and implies multiple cursors and features in Sublime aren’t. Just because your brain is trained to not think about it anymore doesn’t make it any less visible. Multiple cursors aren’t a native feature in many tools, it is still something to learn how to use, let alone effectively — just as Vim key bindings are. Plus, vim is more than j…
I think I noticed halfway through reading that most of this is AI nonsense.
Ginger Bill is not AI-friendly so that's absurd.