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I don't understand your analogy. Is the Wizard of Oz repulsed because he thinks the illusion is bad, or because he knows how it's made? Would "This is the worst hunk-a-junk implementation of an illusion I've ever seen?" be an accurate interpretation of what he means? Jeff's post and your comment both confuse me on this point - I can't figure out when either of you are talking about quality of implementation (when I read "code" I think implementation) and when you're talking about quality of user experience. I'm not even sure if you and Jeff are saying the same thing. Jeff spends most of his post talking about bad user experiences caused by programs written by people who are probably not experts, but then he ends by saying that all programmers should hate their own code. I, and most people on HN apparently, interpret this to mean that we should all hate the quality of our implementations. Not only is this weird on it's face (surely many people who read Jeff's blog, let alone HN, have seen worse code than what they usually write themselves), but it doesn't seem to follow from the rest of the post. My reading of your comment leads me to believe that you dislike all code/implementations on general principle, but I can't tell if you even refer to the user experience at all. The second to last sentence seems to, but I can't figure out how the rest of the comment relates to it because the rest of the comment seems to be purely about implementation (except for the reference to the Wizard of Oz, which is completely ambiguous in that regard as far as I can tell). My experience seems to be different than yours. I might have thought of software as magic when I was exposed to computers for the very first time, but as soon as I learned a little bit about how they worked none of it was really "magic" any more. A good user experience might be smooth, or quick, or intuitive, or even delightful, but I don't see it as magic. Occasionally I see something and I don't know how it was done, and it that case I want to know. I want to look under the covers, just like I wanted to know how computers worked. The connotations of "magic" hardly arise, because I immediately move past the "I can't believe that works!" stage to the "how does it work?" stage. I assume (or in the case of computers, know) there is machinery under the covers even before I see it, and I want to see it. There is nothing necessarily repulsive about the machinery to me, and in fact the machinery has its own beauty that is largely independent of the user experience. My ideal piece of software delivers a fantastic user experience with beautiful machinery, but I understand that beauty in one part does not necessarily imply beauty in the other. The user experience is generally more important than the quality of the code, but there is no law that says code has to be repulsive. We seem to disagree about that. I would not say that my own code was the worst I've ever seen, but I am always dissatisfied with it and with the user experience it delivers because I always think it could be better. I completely agree with Jeff's Parnas quote, and I also agree that Jeff is probably an incompetent programmer in the judgement of Parnas and others like him. So I maybe I agree with Jeff's intended point. On the other hand, I think Jeff has delivered some pretty good user experiences, and I think many programmers who really don't produce great code and/or create a net increase in programmer demand can and do deliver decent, or even fantastic, user experiences. (This is probably one of the reasons why we have so many incompetent programmers and don't live in Parnas's ideal world. Relatively incompetent programmers can still deliver good user experiences, so in the short term it's expedient to deliver software that way. In the long term, we have a shit ton of deeply stacked shit and all the really good programmers are spending their time making shit shoveling tools instead of advancing the state of the art, but hey. Just another tradeoff.) Speaking for myself, I know I'm an incompetent programmer who would not have a job in my own ideal world, but my goal is to not be that guy, and I would prefer not to hire that guy, or the guy who has never seen worse code than his own, doesn't make a clear distinction between his own level of skill and the level of skill displayed by crapware developers, does not aspire to write anything terribly ambitious from a technical standpoint, and in fact has nightmares about it. I enjoy programing, and I am more suspicious of people who say they hate software than I am of people who say that their own code is not the worst they've ever seen. |