[taeric]

My address of it is that things don't separate to distinct things, often. They, instead, made new forms that have their functions. Or vice versa, if you want.

This is true for content as much as services. In simplistic cases, you can point at something and say "there is the content." Often, though, you cannot. The distinction between the two is a huge blur.

You are bringing up, essentially, that abstractions can be layered. I agree with that, with each layer having is own forms for its functions.

Applied to the example here. I am not saying they are identical. I'm saying that they are best considered together. Such that our industry typically passes the buck on UI and UX, to the detriment of everything.

[Geminidog]

No. I am bringing up the fact that form and function are always separated in our industry and that this is fundamental to the entire industry making your initial statement categorically wrong.

It's obvious that abstractions have costs and it's obvious that sometimes things are designed holistically. But these obvious things are off topic. The point here is that your initial statement is completely and utterly wrong wrong wrong.

Please stay on topic. Are you still claiming your initial statement is right? or are you now claiming it's wrong? Don't change the topic into the industry "passing the buck to UI and UX" this is not your initial statement.

[taeric]

My opening statement is short, so I'm assuming some charity in reading it. My complaint is the idea that you can make a hard distinction between function and pass that to another layer is a huge mistake in our industry. As noted by us conversing in a web browser. :)

Are they separate things? I mean, yeah. But they interplay with each other such that near every attempt to force them apart is full of ugly edge cases such that I assert we would benefit from people seeing that form and function typically work together in building things that work.

[Geminidog]

>My opening statement is short, so I'm assuming some charity in reading it. My complaint is the idea that you can make a hard distinction between function and pass that to another layer is a huge mistake in our industry. As noted by us conversing in a web browser. :)

Ok, so you are basically implying that your opening statement is wrong and what you meant to say is that abstractions do not have zero costs and that the industry is unaware of this. Just admit you're wrong instead of relying on the political stratagems used by "architects" to stay relevant.

I would argue that everyone is fully aware of this concept. It's a necessary evil done to reduce complexity otherwise we would all be programming in assembly language. As for AWS specifically, isn't it proof of what you say? The technical details are leaking into the interface showing that function and form can't be fully separated.

If you're saying the architecture of AWS should have been holistically designed to support a more intuitive interface, I would say you're describing another problem all together. A holistic design is a synonym for "waterfall," and there's a good reason why it's avoided in the industry.

The problem with waterfall is that the current needs of the market is always a moving target. No architect or even UI/UX designer can predict the needs of the market in the future thus things are continuously put together agile style (aka ad hoc). This produces technical debt which is something neither Architect nor the UX/UI designer can solve. AWS definitely suffers from some debt and the UI reflects this, but again, this is NOT because they lack "architects" as every company has this problem whether or not the company has "architects."

[taeric]

With my statement following the claim that UI/UX is not an architectural issue, I'm not sure how you are getting this reading.

I maintain that separating the ui/ux from the architecture is a fools' errand. Any other reading of my statements, while almost certainly my fault, don't make sense here.

[Geminidog]

The way I took it is that you said your original statement in a broader context along the lines of "in computer science form and function should never be separated." And you used that statement to apply it to UI/UX and architecture.

This statement is patently false, especially for UI/UX. Even at the lowest level there are platform agnostic API's (opengl) that are divorced from CPU/computer architecture. At even higher levels, javascript/css/html is a graphics API that is divorced from even the operating system. Separation of form and function is the foundation of software. It cannot be a "fools errand" when all of UI/UX is designed with the separation of form and function in mind.

It is therefore fundamentally impossible for you to stand by a notion that is completely false. More than likely your statement is just a mistake and you didn't think it through. Such is one of the downfalls of "Architects"... they are so concerned with high level truthisms that they fail to even build the correct high level picture of the computing world.

For software systems, the devil is, unfortunately, in the details.

[taeric]

You still seem to be taking a very non charitable read. I aluded to the browser, specifically because of the hard split between content markup and stylistic markup that is of very arguable benefits.

It is alluring. And when it works, it feels magical. Yet I still prefer TeX over many of the document systems I have been subjected to use. Markdown being a strong modern contender that embraced the ascii art nature of plain text files. Throw in the modern resurgence of jsx and the hard won separation of scripting from content is not even fought anymore.

To the ui/ux point, directly, I'm not even sure what you are arguing. The APIs that you list are all notorious for being bad leaking abstractions. And is why people make products over them, introducing new forms and functions for a different set of users. Just look at how you shoe horn shaders into those low level APIs.

But again, in the context of this story, I meant that you can't separate out the ui/ux concerns of a product completely from who owns that product. So, for AWS, they own both service and console. If one is bad, it is almost certainly from lack of prioritization in the team that owns the whole product. Often behind the guise of "this is not the architecture's concerns, but the front end."

Jumping to another metaphor to try and say it differently. In a bike, you can separate the drive train from the steering, but it will be a largely perspective based separation. Such that the entire bike is ultimately part of the steering and the power distribution. Yes, this is a simplistic look at it, but no more so than thinking you can fully isolate one from the other.

(Now, I do have to confess that Tufte is finally really resonating with me. And I fully agree that much of this is as useful as so many platitudes. Ask me about front end versus back end, someday. :) )