The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge)

Posted Mar 2, 2004 2:08 UTC (Tue) by Aguila (guest, #19832) [Link]

But let's not elevate too much hope here. What is being recommended here a radically different standards of work and application skill sets for open source and maybe eventually paid programming projects as well. This is not the kind of skill that can be outsourced either because it requires human comprehension of cultural expressions in each language of every culture. I don't know if any programmers know this really well, but the human family is not united on mathematics or science. The Human family is barely able to talk to different expressions of itself and it is not happy.

Let's examine this carefully because those of us in this discussion have adequate technical skills at least to address each other and maybe even others not so skilled. This gives us an advanced standing -- as thinkers.
In short, addressing directly the issue of what thinking about technology and how it will be used by users -- actually means and how this can be implemented in a helpful manner. Recall the sensitive cultural nuances anyone of us can discuss and the problem of designing software with respect to a cultural context becomes clearer.

We are as a planet, nearly in complete confusion because a few of us want to maintain traditions including the domination of women which has gone on for thousands of years and make that the norm forever. And others, who feel more change faster is actually better.

The best answer is to approach carefully every and each cultural context respectfully (which we can take the time to do as program designers) and learn the use of symbols and language and their meanings in their cultural contexts. This is not easy to do. There is no super or meta-language which we can use because all our symbols are derived from other sources. Also ducking the problem by insisting on English only is a non-starter and silly as many people in the US found out when they would have to rename 3/4 of the country to activate an all-out English only paradigm. Imagine beautiful Baton Rouge renamed to Stick Red; the state Colorado renamed to Red. The significance? Baton Rogue is French; the name addresses a concept of the fashion of walking with a sharpened, polished and refined red staff - in short a place of culture and tough syle representative of the quality of the kind of wooden staff used. Colorado is Spanish, named by the Spaniards who passed through the region and named the area for the color of its earth. Colorado, then refers to the Red Earth. Can you imagine what would be lost if Los Angeles, a Spanish name, is simply called The Angels! NO WAY, culture and language carry images and meanings important to humans, even to and for us.

Software can only fit into that world like a fine piece of furniture if caring attention is paid to the user's cultural context. There's a good reason Apple spent a pretty penny before selling its first Mac and has continued researching human interface issues ever since.

There is also another difficulty amongst us as well, irregardless of who we
are. The sense of cultural superiority. This will continue to blind us from examining and caring to address appropriately Aunt Tillie's or anyone else's daily cultural experience. Bringing any user up to date in an informative manner without insults -- such as "check man", as the only help advice or worse, must end. Such terseness and non-explanations must be redone because such attention to detail is just what the Mac does very, very well and Microsoft less so and Linux and others almost not at all.
Guess where Aunt Tillie will go?

Remember the Mac is now another Unix box and it has all its power but the users don't know it. It is of some significance to consider that in its short time Apple converted the Mac to a Unix machine that Apple can now seriously state that the Mac is THE largest amount of UNIX systems sold. The Mac remember produces beautiful screen and print output in all human languages and somehow the help systems keep improving as well as the accessability of the interface.

I don't know if Linux can do all that well, but it sure can do, we sure can do -- better than what has been done. Towards that end, I heartily agree, and will cooperate towards that lofty goal. Aguila

Posted Mar 2, 2004 4:13 UTC (Tue) by sandy_pond (guest, #9734) [Link]

Posted Mar 2, 2004 5:34 UTC (Tue) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

Posted Mar 2, 2004 9:33 UTC (Tue) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

To be honest, ESR should try hard to understand _why_ we're in such a loosy shape - having thousands of talented programmers, yet failing at some obvious places (wrongly thought-out GUIs for admin tasks is just one of many problems plaguing the FLOSS development; I can rant for hours regarding the pathetic absense of a general-purpose configuration API, for example). Maybe one should take less bias towards the bazaar model? Appearance of freedesktop.org and its emerging set of standards is IMHO a sign of such a maneuver, but we're in an ultimate need of lower, OS-level widely employed standards such as (the aforementioned) configuration, resource announcement/location,... APIs. The truly sad fact is such protocols AND imeplementations in many cases do exist, but are often used only by a handful of projects. Look at the SQL-related projects, for example. Among hundreds and hundreds of DB-based apps/utilities only a few per cent use the ODBC API. Granted, some are specially tailored for Postgres or MySQL (though why these two can't reach mutual compatibility while successifully emulating commercial closed-source counterparts has always seem to me a dark force conspiracy), but for most, the ODBC common denominator would be more than adequate. Etc etc...

Posted Mar 2, 2004 18:24 UTC (Tue) by lvteacher (guest, #14548) [Link]

However, one of the products to which Gates attributes the initial success of Windows is Visual Basic (VB).

With VB, the user interface is created/designed first then the underlying code is fit to the user interface. This is not to say that there have not been some diasterous designs using VB. The point is that the software developer must think in terms of the end user. Not what she/he likes.

lvteacher

Posted Mar 2, 2004 19:55 UTC (Tue) by cthulhu (guest, #4776) [Link]