Interesting choice of analogy. Remember Neal Stephenson's "Hole Hawg" essay [0]? He compares UNIX to this ludicrously, dangerously over-powerful hand drill with no safety features and all the ergonomics of a chunk of steel pipe. And by this he means praise! The implication in that essay was that a powerful, dangerous, unfriendly tool is in some way better than a user-friendly tool that lacks the power to remove limbs.
My takeaway from that essay was that in the real world, you will never see a contractor using a Hole Hawg, or anything like it, and hackers have a uniquely fucked-up attitude to human factors. Hackers will excuse the most tragic of user interfaces, with some kind of macho "rite of passage" bullshit. Yes, "macho":
"Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool."
See? It's all about self-inflicting pain, because if you can't tolerate the pain of a crappy user interface, you're not a real hacker [1]. I see it in the defense of git's crappy user interface ("the reason you can't remember the 50 semi-orthogonal cryptic commands is because you haven't grokked its perfect model of directed acyclic graph theory"). I also see it in the perpetual defense of Emacs' crappy user interface (infuriating, because it is a powerful piece of software). Hell, I even see it in the defense of the command line interface itself (and associated scorn of GUIs) - many of its design decisions have been baked in since 1969, yet to listen to many apologists its perfection is such that it might as well have been carried down the slopes of Mount Sinai by Moses himself.
This is a major cultural problem with our community. Maybe, if we actually could bring ourselves to admit that our interfaces suck, we might start to make a little progress towards fixing them. Because right now, "tolerance for unreasonable bullshit" is a major filter for who gets to do programming.
"...when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror. But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself."
Yes. Blame yourself. Blame yourself for using a stupid tool with a bad user interface.
My takeaway from that essay was that in the real world, you will never see a contractor using a Hole Hawg, or anything like it, and hackers have a uniquely fucked-up attitude to human factors. Hackers will excuse the most tragic of user interfaces, with some kind of macho "rite of passage" bullshit. Yes, "macho":
"Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool."
See? It's all about self-inflicting pain, because if you can't tolerate the pain of a crappy user interface, you're not a real hacker [1]. I see it in the defense of git's crappy user interface ("the reason you can't remember the 50 semi-orthogonal cryptic commands is because you haven't grokked its perfect model of directed acyclic graph theory"). I also see it in the perpetual defense of Emacs' crappy user interface (infuriating, because it is a powerful piece of software). Hell, I even see it in the defense of the command line interface itself (and associated scorn of GUIs) - many of its design decisions have been baked in since 1969, yet to listen to many apologists its perfection is such that it might as well have been carried down the slopes of Mount Sinai by Moses himself.
This is a major cultural problem with our community. Maybe, if we actually could bring ourselves to admit that our interfaces suck, we might start to make a little progress towards fixing them. Because right now, "tolerance for unreasonable bullshit" is a major filter for who gets to do programming.
"...when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror. But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself."
Yes. Blame yourself. Blame yourself for using a stupid tool with a bad user interface.
[0] http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html [1] https://xkcd.com/378/