31–40 of 125 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read about vi before? How do you know all the shortcuts?
I googled it. I did not know vi before that, and now I use vim as my main editor for code.
> We've simply gotten used to them: Dealing with the idiosyncracies of bash, vi, or the JavaScript type system This stuck out to me, there seems to be a trend in UX/UI where any move away from the "simplest path" is seen as a huge negative. Could it be the case that we use these tools (especially UI patterns like vi) because after the learning curve the give a huge amount of value? It seems like we are assuming that…
> But look at this guitar player with blisters. A harpist has blisters, a base player with blisters. There's this barrier to overcome for every musician. Imagine if you downloaded something from GitHub and it gave you blisters. Right? The horrors!
That whole talk is filled with some interesting takes on designing and building software (with the usual skew that paints Clojure in a good light, so take it with a grain of salt if necessary).
[1] https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
The problem with developer tools is not technical, it's all about the selling part. If you make a new superior developer experience, you think developers will instantly see the benefits? haha! You first have to teach them, then after a few month if you are lucky you will get a "aha, now I understand". So first you need to manually educate each user until you have a critical mass. Then you need to market and hype your…
> We've simply gotten used to them: Dealing with the idiosyncracies of bash, vi, or the JavaScript type system This stuck out to me, there seems to be a trend in UX/UI where any move away from the "simplest path" is seen as a huge negative. Could it be the case that we use these tools (especially UI patterns like vi) because after the learning curve the give a huge amount of value? It seems like we are assuming that…
For professional tools knowledge encoded in the head supported by appropriately encoded knowledge in the world absolutely is a viable approach, provided there's appropriate feedback and conceptual mapping corresponds to the mental model a user has about how that tool works, i.e. actions and reactions should be consistent.
With modal design patterns such as the ones used by vi, for example, this can become a problem.
That 30 year time frame takes us back to 1990 and back then the user experience was limited by the technology of the time.
However a decade later we had Windows XP.
I would say that 20 year old Windows XP might in fact be a much better user experience than the modern UX/UI we have to live with today.
The much less powered CPUs of that time felt much more responsive than the modern day CPUs/OS that we have to today.
* Legible Mathematics, an essay about the UI design of understandable arithmetic: http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/
* FuzzySet: interactive documentation of a JS library, which has helped fix real bugs: http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/
* Flowsheets V2: a prototype programming environment where you see real data as you program instead of imagining it in your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q
* REPLugger: a live REPL + debugger designed for getting immediate feedback when working in large programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk
* Marilyn Maloney: an interactive explanation of a program designed so that even children could easily understand how it works: http://glench.com/MarilynMaloney/
I mean, fairly often throughout the years. Particularly in communities for lisps, ruby, perl, python, C. More common 5-10 years back perhaps.
Relevance is a fairly common topic across the board. Discoverability is maybe the least common topic here, and one that's a pretty interesting one for PL design imo.
I haven't seen too many blog posts about these things lately, but they're frequent enough discussions in personal circles and in mailing lists/chats that this question seemed odd to me.
> We've simply gotten used to them: Dealing with the idiosyncracies of bash, vi, or the JavaScript type system This stuck out to me, there seems to be a trend in UX/UI where any move away from the "simplest path" is seen as a huge negative. Could it be the case that we use these tools (especially UI patterns like vi) because after the learning curve the give a huge amount of value? It seems like we are assuming that…
My point of view is different: there has to be a really strong reason to move my eyes from the code, and in the editors there should be respect for that. For example, I don't want to move from Atom to VSCode because VSCode has those huge icons that take space and distract me, when all I want in the default editor UI is the project directory tree and the code. Everything else should be opt-in.
> We've simply gotten used to them: Dealing with the idiosyncracies of bash, vi, or the JavaScript type system This stuck out to me, there seems to be a trend in UX/UI where any move away from the "simplest path" is seen as a huge negative. Could it be the case that we use these tools (especially UI patterns like vi) because after the learning curve the give a huge amount of value? It seems like we are assuming that…
Maybe a bit unrelated, I got used to Windows 2000, then window XP, then Gnome 2, then Gnome 3 came. So I stuck with Gnome 2, then moved to XFCE, and now with RHEL 8 I had to use Gnome 3 because there were no other options. Gnome 3 is an absolute horror show. I don't know who made it, for who, and what the theory behind it is but I don't see how it would be easier to use for someone non technical, my parents both unde…
> We've simply gotten used to them: Dealing with the idiosyncracies of bash, vi, or the JavaScript type system This stuck out to me, there seems to be a trend in UX/UI where any move away from the "simplest path" is seen as a huge negative. Could it be the case that we use these tools (especially UI patterns like vi) because after the learning curve the give a huge amount of value? It seems like we are assuming that…
Maybe a bit unrelated, I got used to Windows 2000, then window XP, then Gnome 2, then Gnome 3 came. So I stuck with Gnome 2, then moved to XFCE, and now with RHEL 8 I had to use Gnome 3 because there were no other options. Gnome 3 is an absolute horror show. I don't know who made it, for who, and what the theory behind it is but I don't see how it would be easier to use for someone non technical, my parents both unde…