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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

We are talking about programming tools here, not tools for home kitchen chefs to track their recipes. A little intelligence and hard work on the part of the user is expected.

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No that's just programmer masochism. If a tool is easy to use, then I get whatever I needed it for done, and done quickly. I can then move on to doing more interesting things (e.g. programming) rather than wrestling with the tool.

We are talking about programming tools here. A little intelligence and hard work on the part of the DESIGNER of the tools is expected.

Intelligence can be expected. Hard work should be unnecessary.

Interesting non sequitur.

Why do you say that?

Because it does not follow that if you are intelligent then you will not have to do any hard work.

Edit: appear to have annoyed someone with that comment! But do go on - prove to me how high intelligence means that you don't need to do hard work, which is the proposition of the OP.

> Because it does not follow that if you are intelligent then you will not have to do any hard work.

I don't think anyone's said that, or tried to say it (least of all me), at any point.

You seemed to. You said "intelligence can be expected. Hard work should be unnecessary". What did you actually mean? I apologise if I misunderstood what you were saying!

I'm saying that while it may be valid to assume intelligence on the part of your users, that doesn't make it valid to make them work hard. I'm not saying that intelligence gets you out of hard work, I'm saying that it shouldn't necessarily get you into it - and from where I'm sitting, git requires both where it should only require one.

Ah. I'm following you finally. Yes, I agree that unnecessary hard work shouldn't be needed.

What on earth are you talking about? Git currently requires intelligence and hard work to learn properly. Regularfry suggests that we shouldn't need hard work to use a version control system. This statement isn't a proposition on the human condition, and doesn't need any proof.

Actually, I disagree. It took me no more than about half an hour to understand and use git properly. I don't particularly consider it to have been hard work.

As for it not being a proposition on the human condition - I mistook what he was saying, but then after it was clarified I understand what was meant. It was unclear to me what was being said - interestingly enough, that is the entire argument being expressed for the reason why git is "hard work".

I think his point was that software should be designed so that if someone is intelligent, they won't have to work hard (remember, "hard work should be unnecessary", em. mine). But he optimized for pithiness over clarity.

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