The end of dumb software
sethgodin.typepad.com
The end of dumb software
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: The end of dumb software
#2The web/cloud does not automatically make software "smart". Programmers make software smart. Everything else is an implementation detail.
Your addressbook does not automatically hook up with trusted friends to update because you just glossed over about five or six Certifiably Hard Problems such as a) proving identity, b) disambiguating names, c) trust, and d) doing it all with a GUI which will not cause a big-thinker-no-technical-skills-marketing-consultant to say "Why do the freaking engineers make it so I need a PhD in graph theory to use my freaking address book? How hard does an address book need to be? I put a name in once, I type it again, it comes back out? Sheesh, do your jobs, people!"
Re: The end of dumb software
#3If only Stalin's goons had had access to the top five people you talk with and where and when you meet them, all on a centralized network. They could have gone home early to spend quality time with their families rather than stake people out and interrogate them.
Re: The end of dumb software
#4Xobni has identified such dumbness in Outlook. I am sure there are quite a few areas where desktop needs to learn from the Internet world.
Re: The end of dumb software
#5All the problems he's describing could be solved in about five minutes, if he were using Emacs' org-mode, bbdb, and VM-mode or Gnus to read mail. But only if he'd spent a couple hours learning them first.
There are tradeoffs with every kind of software. That little screenshot he posted is beautiful; time spent making a program beautiful is time not spent making it functional.
The ability to run these little utility programs on the command line is a great virtue of Unix, and one that is unlikely to be duplicated by pure GUI operating systems. The wc command, for example, is the sort of thing that is easy to write with a command line interface. It probably does not consist of more than a few lines of code, and a clever programmer could probably write it in a single line. In compiled form it takes up just a few bytes of disk space. But the code required to give the same program a graphical user interface would probably run into hundreds or even thousands of lines, depending on how fancy the programmer wanted to make it. Compiled into a runnable piece of software, it would have a large overhead of GUI code. It would be slow to launch and it would use up a lot of memory. This would simply not be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be written as an independent program at all. Instead users would have to wait for a word count feature to appear in a commercial software package.
http://adam.shand.net/iki/library/in_the_beginning_was_the_c...
Sorry, Seth.
Re: The end of dumb software
#6If only Stalin's goons had had access to the top five people you talk with and where and when you meet them, all on a centralized network. They could have gone home early to spend quality time with their families rather than stake people out and interrogate them.
Like, say, Facebook?
Re: The end of dumb software
#7The web/cloud does not automatically make software "smart". Programmers make software smart. Everything else is an implementation detail. Your addressbook does not automatically hook up with trusted friends to update because you just glossed over about five or six Certifiably Hard Problems such as a) proving identity, b) disambiguating names, c) trust, and d) doing it all with a GUI which will not cause a big-thinker…
[deleted]
Re: The end of dumb software
#8The web/cloud does not automatically make software "smart". Programmers make software smart. Everything else is an implementation detail. Your addressbook does not automatically hook up with trusted friends to update because you just glossed over about five or six Certifiably Hard Problems such as a) proving identity, b) disambiguating names, c) trust, and d) doing it all with a GUI which will not cause a big-thinker…
[deleted]
They lie.
Re: The end of dumb software
#9Unfortunately, often it ends up being very annoying when the computer tries to be smart. Not to say it can't be done, but the PC's helping hand is not always welcome.
Re: The end of dumb software
#10Please say it ain't so. I love dumb software.
Every time I see dumb software (which is just about every day), my juices get going with all kinds of ways to do it better.
I became a programmer because I thought it would be fun and a nice living.
I remain a programmer because there is still so much to do. And thanks to dumb software, there probably always will be.