Re: Switch to .ruby extension?

On Tuesday 15 June 2004 00:37, Ruben wrote:
> At Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:40:26 +0900,
>
> Sean O'Dell wrote:
> > > >Most programmers never get to that level, so there are a lot of
> > > >programmers out there who, when asked to do something they simply
> > > >can't do, defend themselves by saying it shouldn't be easy to
> > > >use/learn in the first place.
>
> I don't know whether it's really like that. If you're mainly talking
> about open soure (or free) software, then in many cases it's probably
> more like this: those programmers put their free time in their
> projects, and they think it's more important to get in the needed (in
> their opinion) features, than to add documentation or to make it
> userfriendly. Additionally, i'm sure that a lot of programmers just
> don't have any idea about how to make a good intuitive gui, for
> example.

That's how the majority of projects go, yes, and you're right about 
programmers not knowing how to make a good, intuitive GUI.  That was my 
point.

> > So in your mind, the reason so much software is hard for people to use is
> > because programmers don't have time to do any more than just get the
> > software working, and ease of use simply isn't going to put food on the
> > table.
>
> I think this applies to programmers who don't get paid for the work
> they do. Userfriendliness (including documentation) most of the times
> is low priority for them.

I don't think a programmer who knows how to make software user friendly 
ditches his skills momentarily to release hard-to-use software because it's 
faster.  Why do programmers work on projects on the side?  As a labor of love 
or for some other reason?  Do they or don't they take more pride in their own 
personal projects than the ones typically dictated to them at work?

> > If you mean *nix is the foundation on which KDE is built, sure, of
> > course. But no one designed unix with KDE or even X-Windows in mind.  KDE
> > could very easily be just as difficult and cryptic to everyday users as
> > anything else in *nix.  It's not that KDE can now afford to be easy to
> > use because *nix laid the foundation.  What about Macs, Windows and Beos?
> >  Those aren't (well, OS X is) based on a Linux core, and they're easy to
> > use.
>
> I think he meant that once the libraries which KDE relies on (the core
> KDE libs) were finished, that the programmers could start to focus on
> ease of use. It's the same with GNOME, they have a big set of
> libraries around which the GNOME desktop is built and these days they
> seem to focus more and more on userfriendliness, they for example have
> guidelines for the way gui-s should be built (HIG.. human interface
> guidelines?), and i believe that official GNOME apps should always
> follow those guidelines which then should result in uniform and
> consistent gui-s.

That doesn't change what I said about the level of quality working on open 
source these days.  It has greatly improved.

> (btw, OS X is not based on a linux core, but on a BSD core and a Mach
> kernel AFAIK)

I know.

>
> > No, I stand by what I said.  New talent is working around Linux
> > these days and things are getting easier to use, as well as
> > remaining, or being more, powerful.
>
> I'm not so sure it is all/only *new* talent. But for sure, recently
> userfriendliness has gotten much more attention (again, in open
> source/free software world), which is a good thing of course.

Competition with more talent in the field is probably making some lesser 
programmers wake up and shake off their old ways in favor of some news ones, 
I'm sure.

> But nonetheless, a more intuitive CLI sounds very interesting, i just
> think it's a lot easier to say that CLI should be more intuitive, than
> to actually give some ideas about *how* to accomplish that. I think a
> lot of people aren't necessarily *against* userfriendliness, but for
> sure they are not willing to 'cripple' their tools to make it easier
> for newbies who refuse to take the learning curve. And tools like
> 'man' and 'apropos' can give you a lot of usefull information. Most of
> the time those are enough to help yourself. (at least in my case)

I like the CLI how it is.

	Sean O'Dell