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While sleeping on the bus this morning, I had what I considered a rather
interesting thought.
Coding frameworks all have the objective of making it easy for
programmers to do work quickly. My thought was, that these frameworks
are split into two groups, due to their usability targets.
The best frameworks (imo) are those that make it easy for professionals
or experts to work quickly.
The worst ones are those that try to make it easy for novices or beginners.
Each set of frameworks is difficult for the opposite set of programmers
to use, but the first holds potential for novices to learn, while the
second will never be useful for experts. Hence the greater value of the
first set.
--
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
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Chambers wrote:
> While sleeping on the bus this morning, I had what I considered a rather
> interesting thought.
>
> Coding frameworks all have the objective of making it easy for
> programmers to do work quickly. My thought was, that these frameworks
> are split into two groups, due to their usability targets.
>
> The best frameworks (imo) are those that make it easy for professionals
> or experts to work quickly.
>
> The worst ones are those that try to make it easy for novices or beginners.
>
> Each set of frameworks is difficult for the opposite set of programmers
> to use, but the first holds potential for novices to learn, while the
> second will never be useful for experts. Hence the greater value of the
> first set.
Arguably this is why most M$ products aren't useful to experts. Almost
every M$ product I've seen to date is designed around the assumption
that the person using it is too stupid to operate a complex machine and
must therefore be prevented from doing certain things.
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Invisible wrote:
> Arguably this is why most M$ products aren't useful to experts. Almost
> every M$ product I've seen to date is designed around the assumption
> that the person using it is too stupid to operate a complex machine and
> must therefore be prevented from doing certain things.
Huh? SQL Server is very nice and powerful. Their IDEs are some of the best
out there. Their latest compiler technology is in front of most other
people. You can code Excel and Word in .NET and pull data out of
spreadsheets to make charts, and take data off of Word forms and stick it
into a database, all without any programming.
Hell, their word processor is powerful enough to have macros that are viruses.
How is that "too stupid to operate a complex machine"?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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>> Arguably this is why most M$ products aren't useful to experts. Almost
>> every M$ product I've seen to date is designed around the assumption
>> that the person using it is too stupid to operate a complex machine
>> and must therefore be prevented from doing certain things.
>
> Huh? SQL Server is very nice and powerful. Their IDEs are some of the
> best out there. Their latest compiler technology is in front of most
> other people. You can code Excel and Word in .NET and pull data out of
> spreadsheets to make charts, and take data off of Word forms and stick
> it into a database, all without any programming.
>
> Hell, their word processor is powerful enough to have macros that are
> viruses.
>
> How is that "too stupid to operate a complex machine"?
Uhuh. And now open Word, type a few sentences, apply some minimal
formatting to it, and behold as an animated paperclip pops up and says
"Hey! That looks like you're trying to type a letter! Are you so
retarded that you can't figure out how to do that properly all by
yourself, or should I just **** off and let you get on with what you
were trying to do in the first place?"
Open up Access and ask to create a new database. A helpful wizard offers
to generate a CD indexing database for you automatically. Because, you
know, you might be too stupid to work out how to create a few tables all
by yourself, after all.
(I presume - indeed, I deeply *hope* - that SQL Server at least manages
to assume that anybody who can afford to spent tens of thousands of
dollars on a database product doesn't need any help issuing a few SQL
commands...)
Similarly, there is apparently no way for a knowledgable system
administrator like myself to install and configure a copy of Windows.
You *must* sit through the cutesy helpy-helper wizards and struggle to
make it do what you want, not what M$ wants. (E.g., there is no way to
avoid creating a local user account in the Administrators group with
auto-login unless you add the machine to a domain during the setup
process. WTF?)
Stuff like that.
Sure, some of their products do allow you to do some fairly powerful
stuff. Good luck finding it though. Unfortunately, the assumption most
of their products make is that the person operating the machine is an idiot.
(I'm sure Warp can give you a long speech about how all these helpful
auto-adaptive "features" actually make it *harder* to learn to use the
software for yourself. HCI experts have been saying it for decades...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New wrote:
> Their IDEs are some of the best out there.
Since I haven't used any recent M$ IDE, I don't feel I'm qualified to
comment on that.
10 years ago I used J++ Visual Studio. It sucked. Massively. But then,
so did the OS it was running on, and they have at least improved that
somewhat, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps this has changed now, but back when I used VS, it *insisted*
that you work in precisely the way that the program's designers
envisiged, and if you try to structure your work in any other way, the
IDE fights you every single step of the way. For a 1-man programming
project such as the things I worked on, it's merely irritating to have
to bend my working habits to accomodate the IDE. But I'm curios... for a
large project featuring a vast codebase and dozens if not hundreds of
programmers, I would think such cast-iron inflexibility would be a
massive, potentially show-stopping issue.
Is this somehow not the case? Or have they made VS more flexible now?
> You can code Excel and Word...all without any programming.
Uh... really? Isn't that kinda contradictory? :-D
> Hell, their word processor is powerful enough to have macros that are
> viruses.
Perhaps by "powerful" you mean "not throught out correctly"? :-P
Heck, there's no way in hell anybody would ever think of writing a virus
for such an absurd platform as POV-Ray - and yet, it has strict
antiviral features, enabled by default. And it had them from day 1. And
there wasn't even a paid designer!
Still, for me the best feature has to be that they spent all this time
designing a macro system, and then didn't bother to document it. Before
you jump down my throat... yes, I *realise* that if you want to know why
MyFooFunction() does, it's trivial to look it up. But if you want to
find out what function will, say, change cell D7 to today's date... good
luck figuring that out from the minimal helpfile.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Uhuh. And now open Word, type a few sentences, apply some minimal formatting to it,
and behold as an animated paperclip pops up and says "Hey! That looks like you're
trying to type a letter! Are you so retarded that you can't figure out how to do that
properly all by yourself, or should I just **** off and let you get on with what you
were trying to do in the first place?"
Because unlike some systems, MS designs things to be usable both by casual
customers and expert customers. For the most part, at least. That the
paperclip offers to help out doesn't mean the system is useless to experts,
which is what you were contending.
> Is this somehow not the case? Or have they made VS more flexible now?
You can certainly still use the command line if you want.
> for a large project featuring a vast codebase and dozens if not hundreds of
programmers, I would think such cast-iron inflexibility would be a massive,
potentially show-stopping issue.
Not necessarily. It gets everybody working the same way, which is good.
Since I can't guess what problems your hyperbole refers to, I couldn't guess
whether they fixed it or not.
>> You can code Excel and Word...all without any programming.
> Uh... really? Isn't that kinda contradictory? :-D
It depends on what you mean by "code". Can you build a spreadsheet without
coding? If so, you can load the cells from a SQL server without coding.
> Perhaps by "powerful" you mean "not throught out correctly"? :-P
I'm not sure what that has to do with whether experts can use the system.
> But if you want to
> find out what function will, say, change cell D7 to today's date... good
> luck figuring that out from the minimal helpfile.
And if you want to iterate over all the elements in a list in Haskell and
apply your function to them, good luck figuring out it's called "map"
without having read a book about functional programming first.
The help file isn't to teach you every feature of the system. Stuff is too
complex for that these days. You either look it up on MSDN, or you buy a
book, or you go to a class, or something like that. The man page for GCC
doesn't tell you how to program, either.
However, entering "set cell to today's date" in help brings back "Inser the
current date and time in a cell" as the first hit, and "date and time
functions" as the second hit, so I'm not sure what you're looking for there.
The first hit on "excel insert date function" on MSDN gives you back some
sample code in VBA, if that's what you're talking about. So again, I'm not
sure what you're looking for that you aren't finding. About a third of the
way down the page is the tutorial for "Accessing Microsoft Office Data from
.NET Applications," which would seem to cover the entire bit there.
Which is not to say it isn't frustrating sometimes to look for
functionality. But it's not like the information isn't out there anywhere -
it's just hard to find.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> large project featuring a vast codebase and dozens if not hundreds of
> programmers, I would think such cast-iron inflexibility would be a
> massive, potentially show-stopping issue.
BTW, given that Microsoft uses their own compilers and tools, and they do
manage to put out some pretty sophisticated software that takes lots of
people to build, it would seem that the tools are sufficiently flexible to
avoid show-stopping hundreds of programmers working on a massive system.
Yes, Vista was late. We all know that.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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On 2/9/2009 1:28 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Uhuh. And now open Word, type a few sentences, apply some minimal
> formatting to it, and behold as an animated paperclip pops up and says
> "Hey! That looks like you're trying to type a letter! Are you so
> retarded that you can't figure out how to do that properly all by
> yourself, or should I just **** off and let you get on with what you
> were trying to do in the first place?"
Have you any idea how many people in the workforce cannot write a well
formatted letter? Features like that make Word an attractive product
for many hundreds of thousands, if not literally millions, of people who
would otherwise not bother with it.
> Open up Access and ask to create a new database. A helpful wizard offers
> to generate a CD indexing database for you automatically. Because, you
> know, you might be too stupid to work out how to create a few tables all
> by yourself, after all.
Actually, the first few times I used Access, I had it autocreate some
DBs for me so I could see how the structure worked. But then, I've
never used SQL (except a few commands in a PHP script), and I've never
studied database design, so maybe I'm one of those users who is "too
stupid to work out how" by myself.
> Similarly, there is apparently no way for a knowledgable system
> administrator like myself to install and configure a copy of Windows.
At least through XP, there was a method of burning your own custom
install of Windows to an image that could be used from a CD for an
unattended install. I believe there was a way to do remote installs as
well, but I'm not sure about that one.
--
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
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Chambers wrote:
> Have you any idea how many people in the workforce cannot write a well
> formatted letter?
Or how many marketing people struggle with basic grammar, for that matter? :-)
>> Similarly, there is apparently no way for a knowledgable system
>> administrator like myself to install and configure a copy of Windows.
>
> At least through XP, there was a method of burning your own custom
> install of Windows to an image that could be used from a CD for an
> unattended install. I believe there was a way to do remote installs as
> well, but I'm not sure about that one.
Yes. If you never look for the information, of course, you don't find it.
But HP doesn't sit there installing the OS one at a time when they make
machines. :-)
http://labmice.techtarget.com/windowsxp/Install/unattend.htm
You know, that wasn't really hard at all. A pretty obvious google query
answers that for you, with links to all the official MS pages.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Ouch ouch ouch!"
"What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
"No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."
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>> Uhuh. And now open Word, type a few sentences, apply some minimal
>> formatting to it, and behold as an animated paperclip pops up and says
>> "Hey! That looks like you're trying to type a letter! Are you so
>> retarded that you can't figure out how to do that properly all by
>> yourself, or should I just **** off and let you get on with what you
>> were trying to do in the first place?"
>
> Have you any idea how many people in the workforce cannot write a well
> formatted letter? Features like that make Word an attractive product
> for many hundreds of thousands, if not literally millions, of people who
> would otherwise not bother with it.
Sure. But why couldn't they have added a button that says "yes, I
actually know how to operate a computer, please stop screwing up all my
formatting and just do what I tell you to do, not what you 'think' I
want you to do". Or maybe released a seperate version of the software
for experts or something. It's maddening trying to build a document with
complex formatting and having to constantly revert the automatic,
non-deterministic changes that Word keeps applying.
>> Open up Access and ask to create a new database. A helpful wizard offers
>> to generate a CD indexing database for you automatically. Because, you
>> know, you might be too stupid to work out how to create a few tables all
>> by yourself, after all.
>
> Actually, the first few times I used Access, I had it autocreate some
> DBs for me so I could see how the structure worked. But then, I've
> never used SQL (except a few commands in a PHP script), and I've never
> studied database design, so maybe I'm one of those users who is "too
> stupid to work out how" by myself.
Well, I guess it depends who you think Access is actually aimed at. If
you accept that Access is designed for beginners, then I guess it makes
more sense. Presumably products like SQL Server are designed to be used
by experts - and, correspondingly, don't have the irritating wizards.
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