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by enqk 3932 days ago
This is symptomatic of something that has been bothering me lately. Programmers seem to be in some sort of twisted abusive relationship with their tools. Tools that other fellow programmers have written.

Why do programmers hate other programmers so much? Why do they have so little empathy and care?

Too much staying in one own's head? Lack of exposure to diverse opinions and emotions?
1 comments
wingerlang 3932 days ago
> Programmers seem to be in some sort of twisted abusive relationship with their tools.

What do you mean?

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enqk 3932 days ago
The tools provide some value and we depend on them, however they also abuse us by being very unfriendly and disrespectful of our time.

I think this emerge of a certain way that programmers think of other programers.

There are of course exceptions, but often tools made by other programmers don't seem to respect us as users and have bad user experience: - Few thoughts given to make common operations good, - Lots of clunky menus, - Poor performance,

Basically going out of their ways to make us do something else than programming by killing the feedback loop. (Think libraries that are slow to compile, tools that run slowly or require assistance or are otherwise too granular)

The absolute worst example I can give is something like Hudson or Jenkins.

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mikestew 3932 days ago
> The absolute worst example I can give is something like Hudson or Jenkins.

Though I agree with you to some extent, IMO you chose a bad example. Jenkins has one of the most shallow learning curve of any the tools I use, and doesn't require a lot of fussiness. If I can it to build from a terminal window, I can get it working on Jenkins in 30 minutes.

Might I suggest Appium for your example? The one where, in the official docs, it says "If install fails, keep trying to install a few times." Rest assured that you'll need those instructions. Gawd, I hate Appium.

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enqk 3932 days ago
My experience is using Jenkins with Matrix jobs (and various plugins) for building native code on multiple platforms. There, the Jenkins UI doesn't shine.

Problems navigating between pages and knowing what one is looking at abound. Organizing jobs in various tabs works but isn't extremely easy. The UI doesn't handle well dealing with large lists of nodes/labels.

The plugin based architecture might be to blame for it, however I think it's a conscious choice from the original designers and they should be hold responsible for it.

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