[ploum]

Organizations that insists on using a web interface and ever-changing click workflows not only drive away a significant number of very knowledgeable contributors, but they also form a weirdly irrational culture that fetishizes needlessly graphical content, marketing and fake-usability detrimental to learnability and integration with each user workflow.

[sneak]

“needlessly graphical” requires a citation when it’s clear that if you use a web GUI for this you address a market of potential contributors that is three to six orders of magnitude larger.

srht is really designed for (and thus only really useful for) lone wolf developers who collaborate rarely, if ever, and with a very small number of collaborators who collaborate infrequently. It is not built for large teams with constant active collaboration, it falls down for this use case.

It’s hobby software for hobby users. (I don’t think this is a bad thing, but you should be aware of the product design goals of its author.)

[418tpot]

Some of the largest and most important software is developed over email, e.g. Linux, QEMU, Firefox, etc... Don't make the mistake thinking that email doesn't scale. In fact, for most teams, the opposite is true.

[bitcharmer]

This is like saying that pyramids were constructed without modern cranes and bulldozers so obviously it's the right way to build stuff today. It's clearly not true but there are many power-wielding individuals in these projects who prefer to browse the web with lynx or develop in emacs and will impose this on anyone that would like to participate.

This is wrong.

[r053bud]

No one is forcing you to contribute to, or even use, software that uses an email-based workflow. I’d also put money on the fact that the majority of contributors to Linux, an extremely successful free software project, prefer the email-based workflow.

[bitcharmer]

> No one is forcing you to contribute

This is exactly the problematic attitude. I'm an OpenJDK author but not linux kernel contributor for mainly this reason. There are many people like me.

> majority of contributors to Linux, an extremely successful free software project, prefer the email-based workflow

This reminds me the many absurd conversations I had from my time in Goldman Sachs, few years ago. People with 15+ year tenures claiming Slang is the best answer to any- and everything. They just didn't know any better and stubbornly stuck to tooling and mindset straight out of 1995.

[necrotic_comp]

Not to derail the conversation, but Slang is incredible. Its interface is old and archaic, sure, but it's the best and most expressive coding experience I've ever had. It took some getting used to (especially case-insensitive variables with spaces ?! and the UFOs) but I really enjoyed working in it. All of the other workflow tools, like Procmon, were icing on the cake.

The internal cloud was just getting up to speed when I left, and that was more modern and also a joy to use.

There's a lot to dislike about working there, but in my experience, the firmwide tooling was excellent.

[sneak]

All of the largest software is collaborated on over webapps, without exception.

Windows and Office and AWS and GCP dwarf these foss projects.

There is a reason that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple don’t use email to collaborate on software.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> when it’s clear that if you use a web GUI for this you address a market of potential contributors that is three to six orders of magnitude larger.

You cannot possibly claim that the other side needs to cite their sources and then throw numbers like that out without any backing.

[pjerem]

I have no great love for GitHub, I avoid it for my own projects but their official cli client is pretty functional and there are just tons of other clients, graphical or not for GitHub, GitLab etc …

I say that as someone who don’t like GitHub, but overall it’s far from the worst tool an employer may impose to its employees.

[howenterprisey]

What on earth is "fake-usability"? It's more usable, just admit it.

[BaculumMeumEst]

Fake-usability is when 97/100 software developers find something more usable, but it's fake because I've invested a lot of time doing it a different way and gotten used to it.

[raincole]

GUI is fake-usability now?

Fake Edit: Oh this is HN. Never mind then.

[BaculumMeumEst]

Isn't it weird that such people bother installing a windowing system at all? Just work off the login terminal bro, it's perfection.

[keepamovin]

This is well said and insightful! I will reflect on this kind of phenomena and suspect I will be able to see it in the world going forward. Awareness of this will be useful to avoid the pitfalls described here. Thank you for making this contribution! :)

I funnily think that many of the people poo-pooing the email patch method here, would just as merrily join in on HN were it an email mailing list collection, haha! :)

[fodkodrasz]

In case of GitHub you have this for example : https://cli.github.com/

It is often used in GitHub CI workflows.