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by Joker_vD 2108 days ago
Sigh. Why are there still lots, heaps, and tons of horrible, inhumane, broken legacy technology still around in active use? Because its users/proponents are "knowledgeable and motivated" enough to keep pushing through. Sort of a Stockholm syndrome of computing, really.

My brain is really quite small compared to all the knowledge about computers that is out there. And my willpower too is very limited. So I would rather learn things I'd rather like to know, and be motivated to do things I'd rather get done instead of spending those precious resources of mine (and time! I will die in less than 25,000 days, that's a pretty small amount of time, you know) on something of dubious value.
2 comments
Avshalom 2108 days ago
>>"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."
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Gibbon1 2108 days ago
It's one thing to learn something like physics for dumb engineers. Or Thermodynamics. Mechanical dynamics. Differential equations. Where it's hard to get your brain wrapped around. But there light at the end of the tunnel.

Vs obtuse half broken shit people created out of whole cloth and refuse to fix.

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zdragnar 2108 days ago
They are still around because, through historical accident, they are what everyone knows and uses.

Making a special snowflake that fits your brain better is good for you, but not necessarily anyone else.

Making something good for everyone will, almost inevitably, become a design-by-committee monstrosity that is as problematic as the tool being replaced.

The truth is, I am skeptical that these tools can be replaced by something that requires no effort to learn. At least, for the tools we already have, if you dont want to learn them, you can roll the dice and copy / paste from google overflow.

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Joker_vD 2108 days ago
> Making a special snowflake that fits your brain better is good for you, but not necessarily anyone else.

Yes, and that's why the parent's argument that "you can hack it together in any fashion you damn well please, and you can use it to build peer-grade native applications, typically with little more than a tip of the hat as 'overhead'" is not a convincing argument. Yes, you can learn a lot about it and tinker with it and "harness its power", as opposed to using something that's less flexible, but is already pretty damn ergonomical, and is much more accessible and easy to learn about (maybe to the point you're not even realizing you're learning).

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