[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily

[Gary Sloane]

That's great; we're more concerned with time-to-manufacture than time-to-use.
Most companies define 'human labor' as only that which THEY pay for. What
about the 6 hours of time I had to spend twirling my thumbs because my
machined was installing a Microsoft Windows update, and I couldn't safely
interrupt it?

Even though I'm a software engineer, I don't care nearly as much about the
level of difficulty and time spent CREATING software as compared to the level
of difficulty and time spent USING software.

The biggest complaint I hear from users is that 'only a programmer can use
computers'. To some extent that has become true; the level of technical
expertise required to use a computer has steadily risen as the technology has
progressed. But to hear you guys debating makefiles vs. CMake vs. Bazel is
ironic; the majority of people who use computers are NOT programmers, do NOT
create software, and waste an incredible amount of time waiting for their
machines. If the computer professionals didn't view the world from only their
perspective, the priorities in software development overall would change (for
the better) and the end user would, once again, be put first. Not the
programmer.

Gary
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Message: 2
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 15:29:31 -0600
From: Richard <legalize at xmission.com>
To: Rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Subject: Re: [rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily
Message-ID: <E1iNOCB-0005Ai-M3 at shell.xmission.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

In article
<BYAPR17MB2696193A9DA1C373B3468D82D96B0 at BYAPR17MB2696.namprd17.prod.outlook.c
om>,
    Gary Sloane <gksloane at hotmail.com> writes:

> The bottom line is that the software world has gotten lazy.

Yes, and no.  We no longer optimize for the machine, because the machine is
cheap.  We instead optimize for the amount of time humans have to spend making
the machine do something useful, because the human labor is now the dominant
economic factor in producing software.
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