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The end of dumb software

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Re: The end of dumb software

#41

Post by ptomato »

stcredzero wrote: post #35
encoderer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trouble is, you don't notice the thousand times when Word corrects a "teh", a caps "MIstake", or an apostrophe screw-up. But we do notice when it changes acronyms and other things in a way that makes us ctrl+z the auto-correct.

A part of the problem is the top-down mandated idea of what is "correct." If these things can be adaptive in a non-intrusive way, then it can all be like "teh" and "MIstake." I would love to stop telling new word processors to stop correcting Smalltalk. I wonder if there's any way to keep information like that around with you? I can try to do 100% of my word processing on Google docs, but, am I ever going to get ther…

"If I tell one text editor widget about "Smalltalk," there's no reason why all of them across the system shouldn't know about it."

It is on OS X. (Leaving aside software that implements its own spellchecking, of course.)

Re: The end of dumb software

#42

Post by omouse »

Tichy wrote: post #9

Unfortunately, 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.

A computer is an inanimate object. It is the software developer who makes it do anything.

Re: The end of dumb software

#43

Post by omouse »

silentbicycle wrote: post #12
Tichy wrote: post #9

Unfortunately, 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.

Yeah, when a program tries to be smart and repeatedly, helpfully "corrects" what you're doing, it often just gets in the way or corrupts your work. Word is the first example that comes to mind (for myself, and many people). One such situation is they way that git just punts on hard merge decisions - coming up with accurate heuristics for complex merging is very difficult, but the programmer responsible for the merged…

A program is created by a human being, a software developer, a programmer. So it is the programmer trying to be smart and clever.

Re: The end of dumb software

#45

Post by makecheck »

His examples tend to focus on sources of data. Arguably, a desktop program doesn't have to care where its data comes from, and it doesn't even directly need web features to be smart.

For instance, what is the difference, really, between using address book data that's entered entirely manually by the user, and data that may have been partially synchronized from somewhere on the web? As long as it ends up in the format the program expects, it can appear "smart". The program itself doesn't need a sync feature, as long as something can sync that understands its formats.

So the issue, to me, is that programs just need more open data formats, and there need to be more handy services (like sync programs) that deal with those formats.

Re: The end of dumb software

#46

Post by Tichy »

omouse wrote: post #42
Tichy wrote: post #9

Unfortunately, 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.

A computer is an inanimate object. It is the software developer who makes it do anything.

And what animates the software developer? I disagree that a computer is an inanimate object (unless you pull the power plug).

Re: The end of dumb software

#47

Post by fnid »

omouse wrote: post #44
fnid wrote: post #19

I can't wait for the end of dumb software users .

What do you mean?

I mean users like the author of that blog who think just because he can think of a feature it is easy to implement. I mean users who create a meeting at 2am instead of 2pm and get mad at the software for not warning them of their mistake. I mean dumb like people who create 10,000 contacts and get mad at the software for not automatically deleting the ones they don't care about anymore.

What he is suggesting is just absurd. If it actually did do what he wanted, he'd get pissed off like the guy the other day who got mad because apple's time machine automatically deleted some year old backups of his system to make room for the latest backup.

Re: The end of dumb software

#48

Post by philwelch »

mattmanser wrote: post #17
byrneseyeview wrote: post #5

All 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…

Normal people don't use command lines as it's not discoverable, they can barely type, it's a pain, easy to forget, etc. And compared to 1998 when the article you cite was written, normal people also have supercomputers sitting in their living rooms where time to launch for 1,000s of lines of code is instant, for all intents and purposes. We have APIs, Flash, Silverlight, WPF, Java and many, many more to take away the…

On the contrary, I think the command line was reborn in 1999 in the form of Google. It should be relatively straightforward to work out how Google succeeded where terminals failed at being effective interfaces for normal people.

Re: The end of dumb software

#49

Post by _pius »

jvdh wrote: post #11

It is stupefying that this article is written now, and there is not a single reference to semantic web, or artificial intelligence research. This problem has been identified decades ago, years of research have gone into it, and some solutions have been identified. Granted, most solutions are not workable, precisely because they try to be too smart, which ends up not working either. But just saying "why is my meeting…

All I kept thinking about throughout this article was the semantic web.

Re: The end of dumb software

#50

Post by omouse »

Tichy wrote: post #46
omouse wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer is an inanimate object. It is the software developer who makes it do anything.

And what animates the software developer? I disagree that a computer is an inanimate object (unless you pull the power plug).

My point is that there is a person who created the software who deserves the blame. You can't talk about a computer being smart at all. Either the programmer was smart or they weren't.
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