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the trinary-brightness-level LED on the front panel clearly indicates whether there’s cheesecake, a gasoline fire, or VX gas inside. What, are you stupid?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009…

Lacking a program manager, your garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU’RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, especially when they’ve already written the code.

I don’t know what Joel is talking about.

I’ve never worked with someone like that.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 8:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “the trinary-brightness-level LED on the front panel clearly indicates whether there’s cheesecake, a gasoline fire, or VX gas inside. What, are you stupid?”

  1. Noah D Says:
    April 13th, 2009 at 10:09 pm

    Cheesecake? It’s a lie.

  2. nzc Says:
    April 14th, 2009 at 8:21 am

    And also: the user interface makes perfect sense to THE VULCAN WHO DESIGNED IT, and maybe to THE VULCANS WHO HE EATS LUNCH WITH, but not to many other Vulcans, except perhaps after extensive study.

    I’ve designed some cryptic UIs in my life, and I know the secret joy of decoding one of these things (see: Emacs; assemblers; Forth; APL; etc.) but …I’m very very tired of it, in any work context. It’s just not efficient.