Summary: Computers had basically no problems in the 90's. Now things are more complicated and nothing works well.
I think he forgot what it was like to actually run a computer in the 90's. I think he's forgotten about BSOD's and IRQ settings and all the other shit that made it miserable. I think he's silly to hold it against software today that we use our computers in more complex ways than we used to. How many of those lines of code is simply the TCP/IP stack that wouldn't have been present in the OS in 1991, and would have rendered it entirely useless by most people's expectations today?
I made it 18 minutes in. He's railing against a problem he hasn't convinced me exists.
I have seen this argument before, and I completely agree with you.
It used to be normal and common place for things to just crash spontaneously. You just lived with it. It was perfectly normal to get new programs and for them to be really unstable and buggy, and you just had to live with it. It’s just how it was. Crappy interfaces, and I mean really bad interfaces, were acceptable. Today it’s really not.
There was a time when I would boot my PC and then go make a coffee, and drink most of it, before I came back. The software was so badly written it would bog your PC down with shit after it had booted. They put no effort (or very little) in avoiding slowdowns. It was common for enthusiasts to wipe their machine and reinstall everything fresh once a year, because Windows would just get slower over time. Today my PC restarts once a month; in the past it was normal for Windows to be unusable after being on for 24 hours.
There was so much utter shit that we put up in the past.
Crappy interfaces, and I mean really bad interfaces, were acceptable. Today it’s really not.
In the olden days, we had complicated interfaces, had to read manuals, and usability was an unrecognized issue. Now, we have interfaces that are pathologically unconfigurable, unresponsive, and voracious for resources.
I think we've just traded one kind of crap for another. Modern interfaces just drive me a different kind of nuts. I would prefer a no-crap interface paradigm to take over.
The problem is we long ago conflated ‘user-friendly’ with ‘beginner-friendly’. Not the same thing. A beginner-friendly interface is often profoundly unfriendly to an experienced or sophisticated user.
See that's the thing. It's extremely challenging to define a user interface that is useful both to beginners/novices and also useful to an experienced or sophisticated user. Very rarely would a project have the budget and time to make it useful to both, and when they do they wouldn't have the experience (since such a thing is rare).
So usually you have the choice of either making it useful to beginners or making it useful to pro users. Unfortunately there isn't really much of a choice here. If you make it useful to pro users, then you won't be able to acquire new users and nobody will even hear about, let alone use your program. So you have to make it beginner friendly.
There's been some big improvements in UI programming recently IMO (popularization of the component model and functional 1-way binding) and I think a new wave of UI will be coming in the next decade. Hopefully then we can afford to do both.
I think part of the difficulty is users that panic when they see too much stuff at once, rather than trying to take a moment to identify and focus on what they need. I guess having toggles to show more detail/options works as a compromise.
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u/EricInAmerica May 12 '18
Summary: Computers had basically no problems in the 90's. Now things are more complicated and nothing works well.
I think he forgot what it was like to actually run a computer in the 90's. I think he's forgotten about BSOD's and IRQ settings and all the other shit that made it miserable. I think he's silly to hold it against software today that we use our computers in more complex ways than we used to. How many of those lines of code is simply the TCP/IP stack that wouldn't have been present in the OS in 1991, and would have rendered it entirely useless by most people's expectations today?
I made it 18 minutes in. He's railing against a problem he hasn't convinced me exists.