On Thu, 06 Aug 2015 07:46:08 +0200, clipka wrote:

> Am 06.08.2015 um 03:40 schrieb Jim Henderson:
>> On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:51:12 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>
>>> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant
>>> implementation details"? Where do you draw the line?
>>
>> Back in the olden days, computing resources suffered from scarcity -
>> you had to be concerned about every byte of memory you used, and often
>> implementations of data structures included obscure bitfields in order
>> to conserve memory.
>>
>> These days, computing resources *generally* are not considered scarce,
>> yet programmers generally behave as though they are, and implement code
>> in that way, at the expense of a user interaction model that users can
>> actually use.
> 
> They do? Srsly?
> 
> Last time I was in the software development business, conserving
> resources is exactly what programmers absolutely, positively /don't/
> these days.
> 
> Except for, indeed, ...

Well, valid point - the conservation doesn't go to that extreme, as 
language choices like Java demonstrate.

But I still see a fair amount of software development that's focused on 
performance over everything else, even when performance isn't a primary 
requirement.

>> There *are* cases where high performance needs to be taken into
>> consideration - yet the area where user interaction is *really*
>> important (games), you get both high performance *and* good user
>> interaction design - at least in games that are successful.  Game
>> players have plenty of choices for where to spend their time, and if a
>> UI is too complex, they'll move onto something that entertains rather
>> than something that frustrates them.
> 
> ... game developers.
> 
> (Them, and embedded systems developers.)

True.

Jim
-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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