"powerful, user-facing software packages with a complex UI and tons of features, and a large book which you could read to tell you how it worked, and you could get good at using" was kind of a fad that mostly lasted a couple of decades. gradually the person-in-front-of-computer software lost out to the Web People making Web Service Internet Money, and then the powerful software slid backward into arcane terminal nonsense which normal people can't use. unless they get an LLM to do it for them
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@jk Seems like a lot of technology depends on having a very specific difficulty level. Something similar comes up with music production: on the one hand, oh, no, generative AI will put small amateur producers out of business by making production too easy for their work to be valued; on the other hand, small amateur producers only existed in the first place because of accessible computerized tools that made large pro studios unnecessary. V. hard to keep it for "anybody, but not everybody."
if really Using the computer on a deep level was an experience full of joyful and direct interactions with carefully designed things that made sense in a concrete way, and didn't require years of experience memorizing commands and becoming familiar with arbitrarily-designed APIs constructed by wizards and larpers, then maybe people wouldn't have the pervasive feeling of "i give up, just make it work, i dont care how you do it" that makes skill-formation impossible and empowers our current moloch
@jk my takeaway from reading this: I'm a "wizard" and "abnormal", because I have an easier time using commands than modern apps
Did I read it right
@tranquillity i also have an easier time using commands than modern apps, but that's because modern apps suck even more than command lines
@jk @MaddieM4 Sometimes I think that what web development turned into laid very fertile ground for the seeds being sewn now.
I started web development back in the late nineties. Perl, CGI.pm, the usual LAMP stuff, but pre-JavaScript (even in the client). There were problems that needed solving, sure… processes are cheap on UNIX but forking a new interpreter for every submission did get old. Then came a first… well second… wave of experimentation. Frames. CSS. JavaScript in the browser. FCGI. Even early attempts at server-side JS (like NetSphere IIRC).
And then I moved on from that, and spent a lot of time doing data integration work, UNIX system programming and integration, and later Java network programming; occasionally I’d peek back at what was going on in the web world, seeing stratum on stratum of garbage serving the nascent surveillance capitalism industrial complex while every designer tried harder and harder to recreate Teh Deshktop Snappy, and later the native mobile experience, on the web. All the while piling on, bolting on, taping together without much care for any sort of elegance, efficiency, or clarity but plenty of concern for personal brands and cute pet names for frameworks.
i have seen people fall in love with a node graph, or live coding, or a tweakable or composable set of UI components, where they bang the rocks together until the thing they want exists. and in the process they learn so much about the different types of rocks and what they're made from. but there are so many things where the only way to do them is a 24-step set of arbitrary commands and scripts with no discoverability or feedback, a horrendous gauntlet that makes you want to kill the Computer
@jk GUIs are just too complicated, I'm not an airline pilot, am I supposed to memorize all these switches and dials?
a lot of the Computer People seem to like the latter type of Computer Experience, and perhaps even see it as more noble and honorable than the former
@jk great thread. The fetishization of awful CLIs drives me insane, what I’ve taken to calling “terminalslop”
@jk At least we're mentally prepared for JITferencing and PromptAssembly.