Comment by mfincham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mfincham | Hacker News Reader

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<proselytizing> Software needs to empower the user. Writing arbitrary limitations in to code to make certain functionality harder to achieve is a seriously repulsive attitude for developers to have.

The current trend in removing features from software seems like a great way to have a dire shortage of engineers in 50 years time. The attitude that "software is a magic and untouchable black box, you can only use it to do the specific thing the developer wants you to" destroys the true power of the computer as a tool, it might as well be a radio or a TV that incessantly produces other peoples ideas.

Write useful, empowering and well tested modular code. Let the user work out what crazy and wonderful ways they arrange those modules. Don't make changes that serve only to glob more functionality up in to impenetrable, monolithic black boxes. </proselytizing>

Also: Overriding peoples existing preferences during upgrade? Nice work guys :/

Have you ever actually met any normal users? They have work they need to do, and the software is just a means to an end.

They don't want to be 'empowered' by developers, and they definitely don't want to have to deal with arranging a bunch of poorly documented modules that make no sense if you are not familiar with the underlying architecture.

Then have another checkbox, something like "enable advanced settings (warning: if you don't know anything about cars, would you really mess with your car's breaks?)", that toggles the availability of these kinds of settings. Everybody wins.

We have that. It's called about:config.

Good point.

Your proselytizing reminds me of Alan Kay's idea (at least partly instantiated in Smalltalk) that there should be no fundamental difference between using a computer and programming. This is an interesting idea, but it's incredibly radical - I'm not sure even Kay realises how radical it is. As other people have said, a lot of people want to use a computer simply as a tool, to get on and do their work; that's because they have some definite "work" to do, and that work doesn't include exploring their computing system. Moving to Kay's vision would require abolishing this division of labour, right up to the fundamental division of labour between conception and execution, between means and ends. That is, to realise Kay's ideas of computer use we would have to establish a system with no distinction between work and creative activity: we would have to establish full communism.

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