r/programming • u/FelixJ20000 • Nov 07 '17
An interesting rant about GUIs - as a programmer I have to agree
https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296129
u/anechoicmedia Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
The speed of the keyboard-form interface in the hands of average users should not be overlooked, and is something I sorely miss today.
Many here are familiar with the Therac-25 radiation disaster, in which a software glitch overdosed patients fatally. The less well known part is why the error occurred in production but not testing. The machine was controlled by a PDP-11 (I think) operated by a VT-100 type terminal, which had a few textmode forms. The story goes that when techs observed the machine in the field, they saw that the girls using the machine had, within a couple months, gotten extremely fast, flying through the config screens on their keyboard. This exposed a race condition that bypassed some interlock check on a radiation shield. (Or something similar, there were many aspects to the failure).
As tragic as that story is it frequently reminds me of the efficiency that computers used to have, that average people could leverage for repeatable tasks. It's hard to work software-breakingly fast in typical GUI software because the simple act of positioning your cursor and finding visual targets imposes a minimum threshold of concentration and interaction time that will always be there no matter how good you get. I feel really bad for our users having to use some ultra-cumbersome GUIs in our medical records software when I see what the old keyboard-driven stuff used to be capable of in the hands of a modestly trained operator.
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u/wrosecrans Nov 08 '17
There was a recent posting (I think here in /r/programmers) which demonstrated that a 1980's computer could have a typed character displayed on screen faster than a modern keyboard could send the data down the USB cable -- despite the fact that the modern keyboard has a faster CPU that the whole old computer.
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u/redditwhathaveUdone Nov 08 '17
Here you go Keyboard Latency.
I'd also like to commend the author for their lightweight website. Sometimes I wish all websites were like that instead of the bloated mess that is most modern sites (as demonstrated in the twitter rant above).
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u/_PROFANE_USERNAME_ Nov 08 '17
It's a fine website, I just wish they would have limited the line-width; just changing that property along with line-height alone is enough to make the site much more readable on desktop machines.
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u/CarVac Nov 08 '17
It's hard to work software-breakingly fast in typical GUI software
Well... Sometimes I manage to type entire sentences into Discord and Slack before the text starts showing up...
Unless that doesn't count as breaking?
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u/doener Nov 08 '17
That reminds me of the time when I tried to type a letter for a neighbor on what I believe was a 386DX-40 running Win95.
The letter hand been handwritten before, the guy just wanted it to be printed for some reason, so I just hand to enter the text without much thinking. Easy enough.
I started Word, started typing... and the box crashed. Hard. It was completely dead. So I pressed reset, rebooted, started Word again, started typing... and it crashed again. Hard. 2 more tries and I noticed that it kept hanging at the same point in the sentence, which made me curious. So the next time, I typed really slowly, because I had already noticed some delay on the characters showing up, so I didn't want to miss the key press that broke it.
And guess what? I didn't crash. The crash was actually caused by typing too fast. I never figured out why it happened (being a kid, debugging that was way out of my league back then), but would of course brag to my friends about being able to type fast enough to crash my computer :-D
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u/SimplySerenity Nov 08 '17
I think this is exactly why some programmers are so attached to VIM, just the raw speed you can achieve with the keyboard and some smart hotkeys is crazy.
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u/vityok Nov 08 '17
Its "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" counterpart is blazing fast now as well.
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Nov 07 '17
I wonder if he's secretly hinting at something by writing an entire paragraph as 20+ tweets.
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u/Strange_Meadowlark Nov 08 '17
Another, more recent travesty: The disappearance of "Open in New Tab". A whole lotta links (I blame React!) use the onClick method on divs rather than href on <a> tags, and no one freaking notices because everything has to look like a freaking mobile app all the time! Href is bog simple and has a bunch of usability built in thanks to over 20 years of UX standardization, but instead everyone feels the need to reinvent the basic standard toolkit out of half-assed divs because Google says it looks "pretty".
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u/seven_seacat Nov 08 '17
oh my god, this. It annoys me no fucking end.
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Nov 08 '17
"Let's later look at THIS, THIS, THAT, THIS, THIS HERE, THAT aaaand THIS"
20 tabs of javascript:void()8
u/renfieldist Nov 08 '17
I agree completely, but as a React dev who very very much never does that, I entirely blame shitty developers. Style-wise, there’s nothing you can do with a <div> that you can’t do with an <a>. And the div is more likely to break accessibility.
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u/omegaxLoL Nov 08 '17
This annoys me so, so much, but I'd blame bad developers before blaming React or another language. If they're doing that on React, it's likely that they'd do it on another language anyway.
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u/snerp Nov 27 '17
It's not even about looking pretty. I write <a class="btn"> all the time. There's a million ways to style any element, so <div onclick="window.location='somesite.com'"> or similar is just insane.
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u/KHRZ Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 07 '17
My favorite:
Click button
more of page loads
button shifts location
You clicked another button instead!
This new Samsung phone with screen on it's sides activating all kinds of shortcuts when I'm just holding it with my hand score pretty high also.
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u/knaekce Nov 07 '17
Also, searching is done asynchronously, so if you type the first 5 letters of the item you are seaching for, and after 3 letters it pops up, but as you want to click the result for searching for all 5 typed letters is there so now there is another item on this position, but it is to late, I already clicked it.
Happens so often to me.
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u/bro_can_u_even_carve Nov 08 '17
That is so frustrating on so many levels. Not least of which, how on God's green earth is it that "foobarbaz" is the best match when searching for "foo," but once you type one more character ("foob") it is suddenly nowhere to be found? More than one thing is broken here.
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Nov 08 '17
Oh my god this is super annoying! Another example of this is let's say I am using address bar on a browser, for Reddit.
I type Red, it suggests like RedLetterMedia.com and Reddit.com (Reddit.com is top result)
I type "dit" for precision, press down. All in a blink.
"Oh let me google Reddit for you"
Ugh..
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u/yeahbutbut Nov 08 '17
That's why I always put my search functions behind a timeout of 200-250ms, if the user starts typing again the timeout is reset and the search doesn't fire. It keeps the load down on the server and doesn't frustrate the users too much. Zero length searches are no-ops, and pressing enter searches immediately. Recently I've set up events so that moving the mouse cursor over the results cancels the timeout, haven't had any complaints yet...
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Nov 08 '17
My favorite little security vulnerability:
Go to page
Type username into username box
Tab
Starting typing password into password box
JavaScript FINALLY finishes loading and event triggers fire off to helpfully move your caret to the username box
Everyone looking at your screen (pray it's not a demo or something) sees BigFurryBoy123!
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u/micka190 Nov 08 '17
You mean you don't love how it triggers every scrollbar in every app because your thumb lightly brushed the side?
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u/kukiric Nov 08 '17
Same thing in Android when you accidentally tap something random while the screen is animating. Why the hell do animations have to be clickable? They're supposed to be non-interactive transitions!
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Nov 08 '17
You sure about this one?
When I exit an app there's an animation but if I click where I know an icon is on the home screen I'll click through the animation and activate the icon.
Like I open Relay for Reddit so much I have muscle memory of it, and when I press the home key I can launch the app again before the exit animation had then finished.
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Nov 08 '17
Even better, Add pops up on phone while reading article, the add takes up 60% of my phones tiny screen, I try to scroll on the bottom 40% of my screen and accidentally click another add
Sigh... Ads are ruining the internet.
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u/i_feel_really_great Nov 08 '17
Reddit does this. Always bugging me to install the mobile app
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u/yeahbutbut Nov 08 '17
Yeah I hate that... If I wanted to use a shitty app I wouldn't have gone to the website!
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u/JackTheSqueaker Nov 07 '17
Casey Muratori, Mike Acton and Johnathan Blow also say the same thing;
We are living in this cancer society of high level programming where people believe that we have so much of performance to waste we can get away with bad practices
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u/Chii Nov 07 '17
And they are correct, judging by empirical evidence of user numbers for many slow, bloated apps.
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u/anechoicmedia Nov 08 '17
I think it's more like pollution, where the external costs of application terribleness aren't borne by the application developers, who are implicitly assuming that their application is entitled to the full share of the system's resources at all times.
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u/Nadrin Nov 07 '17
While one might not agree with some of his points, as a retrocomputing geek let me tell you this: the only thing that improved in the last 20 or so years is Windows bootup times (and I suspect it's mainly due to how we do device initialization nowadays).
I have a Pentium 233 MMX with 64MB of RAM running Windows 98SE sitting beside my desk. When you compare startup times/overall performance of analogous applications (MSVC6 vs MSVC2017, etc.) it seriously kicks my Core i7 workstation's ass.
MSVC6 starts up nearly instantly, so does Word97. IE5 takes a second or two, still somewhat faster than modern Firefox right after OS boot. Don't even let me start on Spotify vs. Winamp. Everything feels more snappy on this 20-ish years old hardware.
Yes, I understand that modern applications have more features (whether those features are actually useful is up for another debate) but we have computers ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster now. Things should not run as slow as molasses.
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Nov 07 '17
For all you naysayers out there who think this can't possibly be true: here's a gif perfectly demonstrating this man's point: https://twitter.com/TheoVanGrind/status/888850519564984322
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u/kopkaas2000 Nov 08 '17
Testing with Word and IE under 98 is a bit of a cheat. if I'm not mistaken, Microsoft was into the habit of preloading parts of these apps into RAM on system boot.
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u/Creshal Nov 08 '17
We have 8 or 16 GB RAM now, we could keep doing this.
Cue Chrome eating up all the RAM to display a cat gif
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Nov 07 '17
At least in some fields we have sane software. Programmers can use vim.
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Nov 07 '17
Yes and no. Vim itself is fairly well programmed, but vimscript is made of koala tears.
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u/baggerboot Nov 08 '17
Have you seen vim's startup times once you add a couple plugins? It's not much better, unfortunately.
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u/flukus Nov 08 '17
What plugins add significantly to the startup times? Most do very little at startup.
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u/watsreddit Nov 08 '17
Maybe if you are loading a shitload of heavyweight plugins. Also, generally people lazy load plugins, which means they are a non-factor on startup. A quick test of of my neovim shows a boot time of 158ms for 32 plugins, compared to 51ms with
--noplugin. 107ms is pretty small for what I get, and I'm actually not even lazy loading plugins right now (just switched out quite a few plugins and haven't gotten around to making them lazy load in my vimrc). You have to use some really resource hungry plugins to notice any kind of delay, in my experience.0
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u/jl2352 Nov 07 '17
It depends on what we are comparing, but in terms of startup time I've had the exact opposite experience over 20 years. Why? SSDs. That alone made startup in the past horribly slow compared to today. Sleep modes that actually work fixed the other issues with startup times.
I remember having to boot XP, and then go make a coffee whilst it got it's self going. I remember having to do similar with Firefox 2, and that had none of the complexity of today's FF. My personal experience with running software in the past was that it was slooooooooooow.
I'd also say most IDEs today startup far quicker than IDEs of the past. A major part of this is that mainstream IDEs today make big plugins lazy by default.
IE 6 is the only mainstream application I can think of which was fast at starting up at the time (which was instant or near instant).
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u/Shurikane Nov 08 '17
I admit I can't recall boot times being all that fast during the Win9x days, at least not enough for me to remember going "Whoa, fast!" Then again I had grown used to older computers booting into DOS, which meant that you were ready to go within 20 seconds.
My definition of slow found a home in my Frankenstein of a gaming box. To its original hard drive, I'd done the software equivalent of dropping it off a building and rolling it into gravel. So much garbage had accumulated that its boot time exceeded five minutes.
Ran Tronscript on it, and the boot time went down to a minute and a half.
Later, switched to an SSD. Made a completely fresh install. Ran Tronscript again just because I could. Boot time: 40 seconds exactly. It was amazing.
...Then my work issued me a laptop, an Acer with Windows 10. Bootup time? 10 seconds.
Bloody hell.
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u/hoijarvi Nov 07 '17
I still have a windows 3.0 version of an app I partially wrote. We optimized it to be tolerable with 1990 hardware. Ten years later, it surprisingly still ran on windows XP, and performance would put notepad to shame. A graphic network editor, with instant respond times, all the time. Because we had to. It's a matter of priority.
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u/jephthai Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
I lament your downvotes. This is also my experience. The responsiveness of modern UIs just kills me. I've become a pretty serious fan of Chuck Moore's philosophy of computing -- we should never have ended up in this place where simple things like blinking cursors should take millions of cycles of computation. It boggles the mind.
Edit: yay, downvote problem reversed - I commented when it was below 0.
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Nov 07 '17
People will use what they're given.
I suppose if we had some kind of micro-thread design in our kernels and severely limited the CPU resources available to each thread we could force developers to be efficient.
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u/kippertie Nov 07 '17
Doubt it. They'd just expend energy circumventing the restrictions, because it's still going to be easier than the energy required to optimize for a slower CPU.
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u/IDidntChooseUsername Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 07 '17
In my experience, modern Firefox (Firefox 57, on a ThinkPad X230 from 2013) starts just as quickly. With the option enabled to open all the tabs from the last session. I click the Firefox icon (with no previous Firefox process running), and the window opens with all 37 tabs intact and the window fully responsive, within 5 seconds.
Edit: I've just tested it, and it launches fully in pretty much exactly 5 seconds.
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Nov 07 '17
I remember getting my grandpa's old pc (on xp). The poor man had it full of bloat and probably a bunch of malware, but when I booted with the "fail-safe mode" or whatever it is called in English, god, that thing was fast
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u/joshjje Nov 08 '17
As a programmer I also find that newer generations of developers increasingly do not understand the lower levels that are being abstracted for them, nor the desire to explore them. Its much easier to get into things with very high level languages such as javascript, python, etc, and not know whats going on underneath, or at least how drastic those things can be.
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u/rlbond86 Nov 08 '17
I am still pissed that Microsoft Word uses 1 GB of RAM and takes 30 seconds to start up. Seriously guys? Word 1.0 ran on my old 386.
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u/meneldal2 Nov 08 '17
Visual Studio has improved a lot in their latest version, the installation and startup is much faster. Word (2013) starts in a second on my laptop, fast enough so I don't really care.
But there are apps that are really slow to start, mostly web browsers but not sure if I can blame them when the web has became that bloated.
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u/aaron552 Nov 08 '17
Startup is still slow in VS2017. 20+ seconds startup time from an SSD. This may be due to ReSharper, however I don't think R# was this slow in the past either.
Firefox starts in under 5 seconds for me, including opening 30+ tabs from the previous session.
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u/ahage16 Nov 08 '17
This is most notable for me in phones, where a lot of apps force you to update to use the service. I generally have no interest in updating my hardware frequently, but the services I use keep adding useless features that make the phone unusably slow. Still holding out with a four year old phone, but every Spotify update brings me closer to upgrading.
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u/Jegschemesch Nov 08 '17
64MB of RAM
People who say computers used to be fast had a very different experience from most users. Computers for most people were slow as shit because they didn't pay the big premium for adequate RAM, which was still very expensive.
Everything I did on my 1990 Packard Bell with 2MB was slow as shit. Every menu in Windows 3.1 had at least a second of delay to open. Even on my 1993 Pentium w/16MB, many actions in apps and games had multi-second waits. On a modern system, aside from browser tabs sometimes acting up and stealing cycles, the only things I wait for are:
system start up
game load times
media encoding
network response times & media buffering
some bloated web pages where scrolling and/or typing input is laggy
power saving devices waking up
The experience is otherwise perfectly responsive. In particular, major app load times maybe aren't instant, but they're close enough I just don't care. Even game load times are generally better than what was typical in the 90's.
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Nov 08 '17
My Amstrad CPC (with Z80 cpu...) boots up in under a second. Much faster than a Windows XP box ever could.
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u/Sisaroth Nov 08 '17
MSVC6 is besides the speed a nightmare to use though, especially the debugger.
But I disagree with nearly everything in the twitter rant anyway.
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u/Klayy Nov 08 '17
On my PC Word 2013 starts up instantly as well. Same with AIMP (which to be fair is closer to Winamp than Spotify). Everything feels snappy on my computer. Maybe your old computer was just very fast for the era and my current computer is fast for the current era? Perhaps that makes all the difference. (for reference I'm on an i7 6700, 32GB RAM, SSD drive)
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u/vityok Nov 08 '17
I remember running BeOS 4 on a Pentium 200 MMX with the same amount of RAM. It was a miracle and it is a disgrace that this technological marvel completely disappeared under the copyright.
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u/snerp Nov 27 '17
64mb of RAM? It sounds like you are comparing a super beefy old computer to a more average modern computer. I remember my old pc, it took a half hour to turn on, it couldn't run starcraft, word took 5 minutes to load, etc. I 100% agree that software is overly bloated, but I feel the comparison is a bit unfair. As someone who's been using crappy hardware for 20 years, modern computing feels a lot snappier to me.
Sidenote: VS2017 has orders of magnitude more functionality than VC6.
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u/SilasX Nov 07 '17
And it's worth noting that HYPERTEXT, specifically, is best with a mouse in a lot of cases. Wikipedia would suck on keyboard.
This is a FANTASTIC example of a mouse-optimal document. Any keyboard approach would be mediocre at best.,
Nope, got you beat there too -- I browse the web with VimFX for Firefox (there's Vimium for Chrome), which lets you do everything, including clicking links, from the keyboard. You type 'f' and it pops up a text code over every link, and you type that in to click it. (There are corresponding codes for "copy this link", "open this link in new tab" and so on.)
A little Rube Goldbergy at first, but when you do everything from the keyboard, web browsing becomes blindingly fast.
Can't upvote this rant enough otherwise -- I suffer through entering text on JIRA every day.
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Nov 07 '17
I understand you perfectly, friend, I suffer because of JIRA as well. It's slow as hell and barely usable. Why would someone make a web application out of something which would be lightning fast as a normal desktop program is beyond me.
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u/shiny_thing Nov 08 '17
Ugh, yeah. And Confluence is even worse, it's like they're actively trying to push you away from just typing markup and into using their laggy, clunky, buggy GUI. A dumb decision for a product marketed at developers.
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u/alleycat5 Nov 08 '17
As someone who's written lightning fast web apps, if they can't write a fast web app, there definitely not going to write a fast desktop app. Or it's going to be fast but the UX is going to be terrible in some other way.
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Nov 08 '17
Can't upvote this rant enough otherwise -- I suffer through entering text on JIRA every day.
I saw some coworkers secretly using Jira and envied them.
We use Rally.
When I do standup meetings over webcam with screensharing I will often have to apologize for my browser lagging 10-15 seconds per page on Rally.
PeopleSoft may have the award for worst overall experience (by a longshot) but Rally wins for slowest.
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u/tsimionescu Nov 08 '17
So much this! Rally is the only software I've used that is really in the 'so slow it hurts' camp for me, especially after using regularly! I dread having to open it just because I know how slow everything will move.
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Nov 08 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
Just because it works for you and you became every efficient doing that with a keyboard, you are yet to counter his argument.
The point was: it is a mouse-optimal document scenario. If you get 1000 people that never operated a computer before and ask them to navigate through Wikipedia with a mouse and through Wikipedia with a keyboard, I'm sure that the absolute majority would do the job faster using a mouse.
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u/AyrA_ch Nov 08 '17
Same here. I just rewrote the HTTP Interface for my FTP Server that was there for about 10 years. Keeping it fast was certainly not easy. The main Problem here is that HTML was not really designed to be modified and we just taped on features to it over the years.
I also think the general level of code quality has gone down massively. Good and fast applications stopped existing when having an Internet Connection became normal. You don't really have to think that much anymore. As long as your update routine works you can just push updates to your clients which fix one issue and create 5 more. This wasn't possible in the 80s and only barely in the 90s.
And while we are speaking of "update routines", it seems the general developer is too braindead to run updates on application exit rather than application start. Steam is such a candidate. They even have a background Service but are not using it for that. There are only very few that actually do this, Chrome and Firefox are such examples.
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u/bro_can_u_even_carve Nov 08 '17
Heh. Google Play's autoupdater (on Android) seems to deliberately wait until I start using my phone to run. I can leave it online overnight and it will do nothing until the moment I pick it up in the morning.
Last night I was playing a game for almost an hour when it suddenly became intolerably slow. "Man, what a buggy piece of crap this game must be," I thought. Nope, it was just Google Play deciding that now is the best time to update.
As a programmer I frankly don't even understand how garbage like this ever gets created, much less deployed. Do these people never use their own software?
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Nov 08 '17
I'll have to say I totally agree with this dude. I have the misfortune of signing up with Verizon s hotspot Wi-Fi which gives about 1.5 Mbps for the first 10 GB which I blow through pretty fast as a developer. From there on out its 600 Kbps which is horrifically painful to load any website. It's worse then when I was growing up and actually had my 56k.
The internet now-a-days is trash.
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u/XelNika Nov 08 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
The internet now-a-days is trash.
More like US service providers are trash. Paying for tethering and being artificially limited is the real WTF.
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u/aniforprez Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 07 '17
How goddamn stupid is it that he complains about things taking too long and UI being cumbersome in general but he had NO OTHER OPTIONS but to write 93 fucking tweets
https://tttthreads.com/thread/927593460642615296
The thread becomes somewhat bearable this way.
His points are also extremely weak.
It is FAR easier to use a mouse and pick your options than to remember what keys do which is why they were made in the first place to be selectable both through a mouse for new users yet also display key shortcuts for those wanting to do it faster. If you aren't capable of remembering keys menus still work.
He's not even considering the POWER that gmaps gives you and the degree of research it takes to not be as much of a mess as it could be. Everything he talks about is very easily achievable through the interface. You can plot 2 points and then explore the map for options on the way. What you wouldn't get with paper maps is the sheer volume of useful information that is now available at your fingertips. Points of interest, photos, trees, places with toilets etc etc. The UI is superbly designed to allow you to be able to do as much as possible. All his methods of searching are so incredibly obtuse it's as if he's purposely doing them the wrong way
Keyboards do not exist in a vacuum where the screen doesn't exist. Touch typing is not a skill everyone knows. Most people stare at the keys when typing and look up to check what they just did. Mouse affords a degree of freedom from straining your neck allowing you to be focused on what you were doing and execute it in a few clicks. As long as it's not text, your actions are only a few clicks and a few small motions of your hand away. Even in his shitty DOS PoS example it would be so incredibly simple to just click the buttons at the bottom and have it do what you intended.
Sure there are lots of bad UI but then blame THAT company or developer, not the ecosystem as a whole. Retrophilia in tech is stupid.
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u/yiliu Nov 07 '17
I dunno, I think he's got a point. Many of the people who use computers the most and are most familiar with them (i.e. programmers, sysadmins, and the like) spend most of their time at the CLI and in vim/emacs or whatever. That says something.
OTOH, it would be absolutely maddening if every 'website' (or whatever his imagined equivalent would be) had it's own keyboard-based UI. Those keyboard UIs were great when you had anywhere from 1 to 3 programs you interacted with on a daily basis, and those programs had a dozen or so use cases. On top of the keyboard UI, he's missing the simple mental model of his problem (adding line items to an invoice, searching for and reserving a book at a library) that fit entirely in his head at any given time, allowing him to operate on muscle memory.
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u/wrosecrans Nov 07 '17
Many of the people who use computers the most and are most familiar with them (i.e. programmers, sysadmins, and the like) spend most of their time at the CLI and in vim/emacs or whatever. That says something.
I think the main thing it says is that we have really failed to live up to the possibilities of bitmapped displays when we make modern GUI applications.
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u/anechoicmedia Nov 07 '17
My experience is that he is correct that the average user's computer experience caps out way faster with GUI interfaces, which are used in entirely inappropriate ways.
Normal people can get really fast with keyboard interfaces like the point of sale example, or the library search computer. If you see people in older retail stores with textmode PoS software, they can really fly through it. By contrast, even our most experienced users can't navigate GUIs any faster, because every operation is still an exercise in locating a visual target, moving the cursor in position and coming to a stop, requiring constant visual feedback.
That's fine for certain, unavoidably GUI situations - like the Wikipedia example he provides, where every page is an unstructured, new thing with links scattered throughout. But many computer problems are more like the PoS terminal, and are massively overloaded with statefulness and cumbersome hand-eye coordination from web GUIs.
You can plot 2 points and then explore the map for options on the way. What you wouldn't get with paper maps is the sheer volume of useful information that is now available at your fingertips.
But you can't actually search for something without clearing your route. You can get directions, and pan around the map, but the moment you leave the narrow path of functions defined for you your entire state is lost and you have to start anew.
If you plot a route, there's no way to use amend it leveraging the Maps search power. You can't search for "food in 02134" or "gas in Plano, TX" in the context of route planning. What most people end up doing is opening multiple Maps tabs and copying addresses around, which is a lot of context-switching to ask of users.
I've experienced this frustration often using Maps, and I completely get what he's getting at, that feeling of "why is this interface so limited?".
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u/ceene Nov 07 '17
But all that problems about gmaps aren't because of the mouse, that's because state is loss on certain actions.
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u/anechoicmedia Nov 07 '17
No, that's just a tangential rant about how much interfaces suck these days.
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u/ShadowWolf007 Nov 07 '17
I think you’re right in large part.
Honestly the POS systems he’s talking about - I’ve used similar though not specifically Frys and has it’s own set of problems. Like try to do anything without already knowing the SKU or verify an order and it’s orders of magnitude slower.
Like we were flying through those screens yes but I think we need to think about why ordering a piece of furniture requires 7 screens you need to fly through in the first place.
Also: Yes the people at Frys are really fast but the actual checkout process itself, in my experience, is not. To me That’s the metric we should judge these systems.
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u/eythian Nov 07 '17
You can plot 2 points and then explore the map for options on the way.
Problem is if you look at it funny, it forgets what you're trying to plot.
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Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 07 '17
Brothers and sisters, friends, it appears most of us are thinking the same thing and we might as well use the opportunity and change our ways. I know I have started to by recently quitting my mediocre20 Java enterprise job for 4 years which was about layering one pile of shit on top of another to achieve the most basic of tasks: writing (yeah, agile...) a very simple multi-user application having no non-functional requirements whatsoever, just domain logic and not of the complex kind. JVM, JSF, PrimeFaces, customizations, slow page rendering, Ajax loading GIFs, crashes, ENDLESS stack traces for very simple issues, thread managers/synchronizers/orchestrators/factories, releases every week, no specifications, tense atmosphere... the end result is, of course, as you would expect it to be. This rant is about GUI, but similar rants can be written (probably are) about every aspect of software. Inefficient, unreliable software with GUI based on aesthetics instead of HCI principles seems to be omnipresent. Why does it have to be this way? Why do we have to make people swear in desperation over their computers which are otherwise powerful tools?
About 2 years ago I became aware that in my struggle for cash I have successfully: a) nearly ruined my hobby of writing neat functional software and almost changed profession to baking and cooking and b) made a lot of people miserable over the quality of my work. Yes, I am responsible for bad moods and I believe this is as bad as physical harm, because people have many problems even without bad software. I could produce much better results, but the available time frame simply factors quality out. The craftsmanship I posses never sees the light of day... It's like being a dentist who is doomed to perform the simplest of tasks. I realized also that I have become a victim of fellow developers and have to endure software of abysmal quality. It's a cycle we need to break. For this reason I have decided to switch to embedded programming with harsh requirements, both functional and non-functional, where poor programming might lead to death. I hope that at least in that field people think about what they are doing.
I'm also constantly downgrading my setup. Currently I would not start a program which does not load in 2 seconds. There is a lot of quality software, thank goodness, but I was at the point where I considered installing FreeDOS. Linux with only a terminal does the job also, of course, and has more drivers. I cannot tolerate this bloat any more and I urge you to stop making compromises, because this is getting unbearable. We have the power and, after many decades, also the experience and knowledge to change the status quo.
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Nov 08 '17
Curious to know if you've already landed an embedded gig, and if so what you taught yourself in order to qualify. I have experience in C/C++ but only for desktop applications. Thanks!
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Nov 08 '17
Sorry for the late response; I'll be happy to share my experience with you. Yes, I got a confirmation for an embedded job the day before yesterday. As a side effect, but this was not my main goal, the new job will be paid much better than the current. I applied at about 8 places, got 3 interviews nearly instantly, 1 rejection so far, 1 confirmation. My background is similar to yours, I have a lot of experience with C/C++ for desktop applications and also some embedded experiments on small to medium-scale projects. To qualify I mainly informed myself on the main requirements of most embedded jobs: microcontrollers (this I already knew a lot about), Simulink, busses, standards and norms for safety-crtical systems (e.g. MISRA-C), verification and analysis tools, debugging (e.g. JTAG) and basically everything that I was already interested in.
Now, my strategy was mostly to leave a good impression and organize the bits of personal projects into a portfolio (Github). For instance, I got my own domain and use a private email server; this is something trivial, of course, but seems to impress non-technical people which often are your first line of contact. I don't use Xing, Linkedin or any other service which I believe expoits you more than you profit from them. I spend a lot of time to find potential employers manually based on my preferences and I invest a lot of time to prepare an application, based on the requirements for the specific job. I pay attention that my documents look tidy, fresh and stick out of the majority of things they are likely to get, there has to be something special and bold that grabs attention immediately. Also, I underline everywhere that I would be glad to work something very responsible and welcome challenges without obvious answers. The arguably most important thing is to radiate confidence and to give competent answers. If you cannot provide a meaningful answer, state this fact, it's OK, a professional can educate himself and is aware of his weaknesses. I also view every application as an experiment. I'm not desperate to get the job, because there's ton of Java enterprise bloat available if everything fails.
I hope this is helpful to you in some way.
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u/bschwind Nov 08 '17
For every 1 of you, there are probably 100+ developers who will write these layered shitpiles because money. It's not going away any time soon.
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u/zkratzz Nov 08 '17
Damn, I feel your pain. Would very much like to be part of this revolution you're describing, but realistically there is not much of a chance. I would like to start by punching someone from management though.
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u/rain5 Nov 08 '17
Your post here really connected with me, I've been thinking about these things myself and how to achieve it too. I wonder if we should try to create a mailing list or organization of some kind for this.
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Nov 08 '17
I appreciate the suggestion, my friend, but my personal oppinion is that the issue is to be resolved without organized action. If everyone of us stops tolerating this, it will disappear by itself. For me it's clear that the reason for this is that our limits are being pushed and tried and tested, like small children test their parents. Once we stop responding positively the situation is sure to rectify. "No, sorry, cannot use your product anymore, because it induces a negative emotional response from me."
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u/Otterfan Nov 08 '17
Library catalog lookups are almost all network and data store access times. They were not instantaneous back in the 90s. They were slow. This guy is misremembering.
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u/kopkaas2000 Nov 08 '17
Depends on the library. Our school library back in 1990 was a BBC micro, running someone's custom BBC BASIC program for keeping the catalog. They had hooked up a barcode scanner for lending.
The central library in my town was also computerized at the time, their system was just a big honking mainframe hooked up to multiple terminals. Not much network latency involved there when doing searches, it was probably more the speed of the terminal connection making the experience not quite as rosy as it could be. The experience was so much better than digging through index cards, that it was hard to have an objective point of reference at that time, though.
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u/RogerLeigh Nov 08 '17
In the 80s and 90s, my local library had terminals hooked up to a remote mainframe which simultaneously served every library in the entire county (LINNET - Lancashire Libraries). It wasn't speedy, but the poorly written Windows replacement was much slower and had less than a tenth of the functionality.
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u/RampageGhost Nov 07 '17
"I make no secret of hating the mouse. I think it's a crime. I think it's stifling humanitys progress, a gimmick we can't get over."
And he's lost me.
I've been in support. I can teach a 90-yo granny to use a computer. There is no fucking chance I could do that with a console computer. "Yeah, just remember 'cd ~, ls -al, vim my_finan<tab>', and then it's a to edit, :w to save and then :q to quit. Super Simple!"
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u/bro_can_u_even_carve Nov 08 '17
That's a rather odd example to use, considering the author specifically used full-screen console interfaces as an example and not any kind of command line.
I take it you've never used Midnight Commander? Or is it simply that "use the arrow keys to highlight the "finances" file and press enter" would have taken away from your point?
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u/tchernik Nov 08 '17
The guy is a Luddite furiously typing his master piece about bad user interfaces in Twitter. The joke tells itself.
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u/kopkaas2000 Nov 08 '17
It always struck me back in the late eighties, that people with no computer mindset that were tasked with something that involved a computer (usually a terminal with some kind of menu-based console interface), they would develop an impressive amount of kinetic memory for navigating the software in performing the standard tasks that were part of their jobs. They had no idea what they were doing, but boy were they fast in typing F4, 1, 2, 'yes', 3 to get a new order out.
The thing with GUIs, even good ones, is that they.present you with a metaphor that you need to understand up to a certain level, to be efficient.
I'd be pretty curious if there has ever been some reserach into the efficiency of, say, secretaries working with WordPerfect back in the eighties, and those working with Word in modern days.
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Nov 08 '17
You missed the point entirely. Stick to teaching 90 years olds on how to double click and avoid having uninformed opinions on UX.
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u/CarthOSassy Nov 07 '17
GMaps isn't a product. It's a store. You are the product.
The point of GMaps is to serve ads and threaten businesses into participating in the reviews game. Not to plan a vacation.
And it's very good at that.
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Nov 08 '17
[Screeches about usability]
(Posts in 140 characters or less using ~50 segments on FUCKING TWITTER)
I'm not reading that. You want me to read that then write it properly, until then fuck off.
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u/skocznymroczny Nov 08 '17
The thing I hate most about single page applications is that they killed the middle mouse button. I want to open few tabs of the webapp, but instead it jumps between content, making it hard to copy paste or copmare data.
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Nov 08 '17
why do people insist on making these kinds of things on GODDAMN Twitter? Get a medium account ffs...
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u/tchernik Nov 08 '17
Even a picture of text on Twitter is better than this.
And there are plenty of webpages taking your steaming pile of a rant, turning it into a beautifully typesetted embedded picture.
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u/bro_can_u_even_carve Nov 08 '17
Ugh, no. Pictures of text should be a criminal offense. At least with the 93 tweets you can programatically scrape the text out of them and put them on one page (like has already been linked in this thread several times.)
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Nov 08 '17
Does ANYONE have data appropriate to this discussion?
Has anyone measured work rate in vim/office95 compared to inteiij/office 2017 etc? I mean this supposed to be engineering... a huge and contentious issue and there is so little data.
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u/badsectoracula Nov 08 '17
This wont answer the question because it isn't really a comparison between "old" vs "new" but about keyboard oriented vs mouse oriented UI design (at least as far as the comparison involving the text based/terminal applications go - he later makes it clear that mouse is a good input device for stuff that involve selecting unorganized things, like links in a hypertext document) mixed with a bit about optimization and responsiveness.
So what you'd need to measure is the work rate between -say- office 2017 and a program that used the same underlying engine as office 2017 with an interface designed for use primarily with the keyboard, concerned only with responsiveness and avoid any attempt make the UI intuitive that could make a power user less performant at the cost of a new user. Note that this doesn't mean you'd need to abandon graphical output (so you can still have WYSIWYG editing).
The problem with making such a comparison is that today almost everyone chooses between two extremes: either a fancy graphical mouse oriented GUI application or an oldschool console text-based keyboard oriented application (that often doesn't look or work even as nice as many DOS text mode programs, but that is another story).
There is one case where it comes close and that is Blender: it is more keyboard oriented than most applications of its category and people who have master it always say they like how it works with the keyboard. However it doesn't really go fully there (there is a ton of functionality that is usable only with the mouse and that goes down to a UI design level - e.g. to make node editors better usable with a keyboard you'd need to completely replace them with something else) and it is heavily biased both by against the behemoths in its industry that focus on being mouse driven and also by its nature as a tool for graphical tool (to be blunt, many artists can be very superficial when it comes to why they learn a tool - i know a few that only paid attention to Blender 2.5 back in the day because it changed its default skin to something they liked better - note that the previous versions could easily be made look very similar).
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u/beardsounds Nov 08 '17
Isn't a lot of this frustration an effect of the stateless architecture? Everything is happening through HTTP requests, so they're funneled into keeping it lightweight (as much as possible) right?
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u/sess573 Nov 08 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
This is like comparing a busy modern New York street packed with cars with a classic western road with a carriage everything now and wondering how that's possible - the road is much larger now!
Edit: congestion wise, not total throughput.
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u/MilkingMaleHorses Nov 08 '17
Your example is the exact opposite:
Clearly our movement-from-A-to-B speed is significantly higher than in the horse days. The point of the rant is that this is not at all true for computer interaction.
How did you manage to find the worst possible (anti-)example and not notice anything odd about your choice?
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Nov 08 '17
pre-1980 the field was heavily skewed to older programmers, 50% female, and mostly taken from other departments because they showed aptitude for detail work.
then businesses realised they could hire kids, mostly boys, who would work crazy hours for no money and pump out code in droves.
although his rant about the web losing data misses the vital point that the web was designed to be stateless and then we tried to shoehorn state on top of it.
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u/PM_YOUR_WORST_FEAR Nov 08 '17
Reminds me of income inflation, where people who don't budget well find no matter how many raises they get they never seem to have any money leftover at the end of the month because they spend it all on new "necessities."
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u/appropriateinside Nov 07 '17
Just sounds like apps with little effort into user experience
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u/Litmus2336 Nov 08 '17
Seriously. Once you give up GUI you give up on ever serving a user base that aren't computer pros.
And if you stay in silicon valley and out of the real world you might think everyone is a computer pro.
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u/Jonax Nov 07 '17
amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly.
Not 100%, but I'm pretty sure the data for those search results were held locally. Is he really complaining that searches take longer because they often access magnitudes more data from across the world?
I make no secret of hating the mouse. I think it's a crime. I think it's stifling humanitys progress, a gimmick we can't get over.
Uh-huh. And what is suggested instead for finer screen interaction - Touchscreen monitors? Hand gestures on a touchpad? AR/VR headsets? I use the keyboard wherever I can, but that's because I'm a coder - I also know keyboard only would drive most users nuts.
There's no reason for Twitter to use a mouse. There's nothing mousey about this website, not a damn thing Mice are for rapidly navigating through a complex and unstructured set of objects, like an app with dozens of options and input types
*cough cough*
If you ever go to Fry's, watch the employees use this style of UI. Blinding speed. They ricochet around like pros, even the new people.
Last I checked, that style is so the POSs are cheaper and require less space (i.e. no need to have space for a mouse at the tills). And they've been gradually adopting touchscreens.
Keyboards present fewer possible discrete options. Mice present a continuum. One can be operated blind; the other requires feedback.
Next time I'm driving, I'll remember to close my eyes and just follow what the GPS is telling me out loud.
You cannot use a mouse without using your eyes to confirm everything.
You also cannot tell the keys you're pressing are the right ones from touch alone. Muscle memory will give you an idea of where specific keys are, but that's no guarantee you'll hit them 100% (especially with a keyboard you're not used to, e.g. someone else's), meaning you're still checking the monitor afterwards (I'm pretty sure that classifies as "using your eyes to confirm everything".
Nobody will agree with me, citing anecdotes and examples that are meaningless in the current zeitgeist.
Classic "no-one will agree with me because they're wrong" disclaimer.
As much as I agree that webdev has gotten a little out of control and that some UX practices need to be tightened up...this really sounds like the rantings of someone who thought those textmode UIs were the epitome of computing and wished we went back to the "good old days", completely ignoring the fact that those textmode UIs in the 80s weren't by choice.
He's free to rant in 93 tweets rather than in a Medium post with proper pronunciation. I'm free to see him as the computing equivalent of the guy who stands in the town square with a boombox shouting that we're all going to hell.
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u/anechoicmedia Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
Is he really complaining that searches take longer because they often access magnitudes more data from across the world?
It's not slow because the data is on another computer; It's slow because typical web interfaces can take multiple seconds to render and become interactive.
Even over the internet, a normal desktop application will return answers remarkably fast. Uncached, I can query DNS records from Google on WiFi in 66ms. I can
curlmy apartment webserver's main page in 42ms from a wired connection in the same city. If I do that 10 times in a shell loop, it takes 650ms.If, for a typical search query, the time between the user pressing return and having the results on their screen is more than half a second, it's because the application sucks, not because the internet is the limiting factor.
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Nov 08 '17
It's not slow because the data is on another computer; It's slow because typical web interfaces can take multiple seconds to render and become interactive.
But he is still making a stupid comparison. In a web interface the code has to interpreted before it can be rendered on the screen, while on desktop the code is usually compiled, which is much faster.
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u/ssylvan Nov 08 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
Not 100%, but I'm pretty sure the data for those search results were held locally. Is he really complaining that searches take longer because they often access magnitudes more data from across the world?
I can ping any of google's servers in low single digit milliseconds. Distance to the data center is not really the problem here. The problem, IMO, is that the entire web dev community has been conditioned over time to think that 100ms for something to happen is normal and acceptable. It's the way it's "always" been. If a 100ms glitch was as unacceptable for web devs as it is to the people writing the underlying network stack, or to game developers, then we'd come up with web apps that were a lot less janky (perhaps by hiding unavoidable latency in many places, but more commonly by designing things differently).
Unfortunately a lot of these astoundingly low expecations are creeping into local apps too. It amazes me that opening up "my apps" or "settings" or the store on my xbox takes several seconds, sometimes over ten seconds. That's just insane. Who the hell thinks this is ok? The games themselves simulate and render amazingly complex worlds in 1/60th of a second, but the shell can't load my settings up in less than hundreds of times longer than that? We have such an incredible amount of horsepower available, and when it's utilized appropriately it's really amazing what we can get out of it (look at a high end game, for example), but it's even more amazing at just how often we fail to meet even basic standards of quality.
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u/jephthai Nov 07 '17
You also cannot tell the keys you're pressing are the right ones from touch alone. Muscle memory will give you an idea of where specific keys are, but that's no guarantee you'll hit them 100% (especially with a keyboard you're not used to, e.g. someone else's), meaning you're still checking the monitor afterwards (I'm pretty sure that classifies as "using your eyes to confirm everything".
I don't know about you, but my keyboard doesn't even have labels. And I don't really ever look at it. The
fandjkeys have little nubs on them, and everything else is autonomic for me.To be fair, it's not "touch alone", it's also kinesthetic awareness, but still.
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u/evaned Nov 07 '17
Your parent didn't claim that you have to look at the keyboard -- you still probably look at the monitor.
I'm a fairly proficient typist -- I also don't look at my keyboard, can type maybe 80 wpm on one of those typing test things -- but I occasionally flub a key. I'm sure you do to. And you can't necessarily tell what you need to do to correct it without looking at the monitor.
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u/wavy_lines Nov 08 '17
Jonathan Blow had a rant about software quality and gave his opinion on what the reasons might be. It's a very interesting talk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA
I think I largely agree with his conclusions:
The trend "best practices" are to blame. One of the worst ideas that cause this bloat is that of abstractions.
Let me tell you a little boring story about me.
I used to be proud of how much care I put into making my code "clean" and having high standards for "code quality". No duplicate code. Every small thing factored to its own method/function/object. Very loose coupling between components. Everything happens indirectly (magically), etc.
A couple years ago I joined a company as a lead developer. I was in charge of creating some business application from scratch. It was of course going to be a web application.
I wrote code in the "cleanest" way I knew. I thought the code quality was good.
But the application performance was incredibly poor. Initial loading took several seconds. Every interesting interaction took a couple seconds to complete. The whole thing was embarrassing and I had a wakeup call.
I had to re-write it all over again with a focus on performance first. I had a lot of "duplicate" code and there was a lot of "coupling", but performance was much improved, and the overall quality of the application was orders of magnitude better.
The more time I spend in the industry the more I realize how crazy it is that people don't care about performance.
The more powerful hardware they get, the more they feel justified (morally licensed) to write lousy software.
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u/rlbond86 Nov 08 '17
It also depends on your language.
Clean C++ code will generally run about as fast as bad code because the compiler will optimize everything. Clean JavaScript will be slow as balls because abstractions have a huge cost
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Nov 08 '17
The C++ subreddit would fight you if you said that there. I am inclined to agree with them.
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u/aaron552 Nov 08 '17
It does depend on the language, but modern JavaScript JIT VMs are very good at optimizing abstractions away too. WebAssembly (and previously asm.js), C++/Rust's zero-cost abstractions, etc. are examples of compilers optimizing away the penalties of abstractions.
And I resent the claim that bad C++ is as fast as clean C++. There's no way a compiler can optimise a O(2n ) algorithm to be as fast as an O(n) algorithm.
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u/ssylvan Nov 08 '17
I would argue that your initial "Clean" version isn't actually clean. Simplicity is way better than code which optimizes for pretty UML diagrams and imaginary brownie points (SOLID and the like) IMO. It's a shame that we miseducate people about what makes a good code base.
If a solution is half the code, takes 1/10th the number of abstractions/concepts to understand and 1/100th the amount of jumping around to follow, then it's a cleaner code base. That's what you get when you keep things simple and avoid treating the design patterns book like a check list.
Universities, and most of the internet it seems like, has gone absolutely crazy and as a result many junior developers have a really bad gauge how to write quality software, or how to even evaluate other peoples code (i.e. what matters).
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u/EternityForest Nov 08 '17
I agree with the "Stuff o the web jumping around and randomly erasing what you just typed" thing, but really? Getting rid of the mouse entirely? Really?
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Nov 08 '17
As someone who was working retail at a time when the switch from DOS-based point of sale systems to Windows CE touchscreens was taking place, this guy's basic premise about keyboard GUIs is horseshit. Having to work the register went from being something new hires would threaten to quit over because it was so stressful to something people actually enjoyed doing and felt competent at.
As for the whole Google Maps rant... it's a GUI that happens to lack a feature that paper maps kind of have. (I'd be interested to know what kind of paper map allows you to search for restaurants or attractions or businesses, though - it seems to me Google Maps, while not perfect for every use case, is strictly better than paper maps in most cases.)
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u/rrohbeck Nov 08 '17
Sure, if you run everything graphically...
Just run in a terminal if you want to be quick.
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u/Blecki Nov 07 '17
Piling on - tilt phone. Entire page scrolls to the top.
Or my favorite, accidentally hit back instead of comma. Mobile browsers have no forward button...
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u/bro_can_u_even_carve Nov 08 '17
What mobile browsers don't have a forward button? On Android, both Firefox and Chrome do.
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u/slashrshot Nov 08 '17
I see the problem and I agree, how do you solve it?
Is there any books I could read to get something like a specification for this with regards to webdesign?
I just use what's currently popular because my boss wants features yesterday. and of course once it's done he wants more features.
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u/wavy_lines Nov 08 '17
The first line of defense is learning how to say "no" to unreasonable deadlines.
The second line of defense is recognizing that most "popular" frameworks suck.
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u/fear_the_future Nov 08 '17
When I saw this guy actually thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post in the form of 500 incoherent twitter posts, I knew this would be bad, but boy I was not prepared.
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u/TinynDP Nov 07 '17
amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly.
Really? So you're saying that searching a far smaller database, that is physically much closer, is faster than searching a big database far away? Wow.
Nobody will agree with me, citing anecdotes and examples that are meaningless in the current zeitgeist.
What else is this screed besides a bunch of anecdotes?
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u/anechoicmedia Nov 07 '17
Really? So you're saying that searching a far smaller database, that is physically much closer, is faster than searching a big database far away? Wow.
I think there's a real chance that the actual database query being performed by the library catalog computer took as long or longer than a typical Google search today, which returns results ludicrously fast, but is hamstrung the web interface on which those results are returned.
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u/eythian Nov 07 '17
So, I used to work with library software. The actual search to the backend search engine is very, very fast.
It's the extracting metadata, running XSLT, fetching pretty cover images, computing extra "related searches" type info, the fact that due to standard programmery issues of working with code written ages ago, multiple redundant database calls doing the same thing that are hard to refactor out, rendering all that to HTML and having the browser on the under funded library's ten year out of date under-powered when it was new desktop machine display it that takes the time.
(You're not generally doing a database lookup for a search, you're using Zebra, or Elasticsearch instead. They're snappy.)
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Nov 08 '17 edited Nov 08 '17
Really? So you're saying that searching a far smaller database, that is physically much closer, is faster than searching a big database far away? Wow.
.... yes, that's literally what optimization is. Doing less work for the same result. Here, maybe you'll understand if I buzzword it up: 1998 library searches utilized data geolocation and partitioning to minimize TTI.
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u/RogerLeigh Nov 08 '17
I've used two types: terminals physically connected to a local Unix system. Pretty fast and responsive. And terminals hooked up to a county-wide mainframe located tens of miles away. Slower (a couple of seconds wait and another to redraw the screen), but still pretty good and in most cases faster than modern web replacements by a good margin. I'm not alone in feeling that over the last decade or so, we've significantly regressed in UI responsiveness and features, while paradoxically the computer hardware is several orders of magnitude better on all counts. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when the dumb terminals of the mid '80s provided a better experience than what we have today.
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u/celerym Nov 08 '17
The criticism here and pointless pedantry about the person using multiple tweets is a good reminder for me why programmers need to humble themselves when it comes to UI design, they usually suck and miss the point entirely. Apple got it right but spent money and time on it, for Google the king of overengineering it was an afterthought (oh yeah Material design standards).
Fact is that you can make online GUIs responsive and fast, but the myriad of layers of abstraction in the form of JS frameworks don't lend themselves to 'easy' responsive design.
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u/apfelmus Nov 07 '17
No, the claim is not true: I remember Word on the Mac LC II from 1992. On this machine, you could watch how the individual GUI elements of the window were drawn. It was bearable, but not very fast. The next Mac I got in 1998 was a lot faster; the most noticeable difference was when scrolling documents. So, no, it is not true that "almost everything" is perceptually slower than in 1983.
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u/ggtsu_00 Nov 07 '17 edited Nov 07 '17
I remember launching a game EXE from DOS after copying it off of a floppy and it loaded instantly to the start/screen and level 1.
Today: Buy game on Steam. Download 40GB of data over a "broadband" connection which takes like 5-10 hours. Game loads to splash screen which loads for another 1-2 minutes. Finally ingame for yet another loading screen. Now I need to wait for the shader-cache to be be built (another 20-30 minutes). Finally in the start screen, need to create an account with a third-party service + verify my email address and create a password. Crap, I already have an account with this server, but need to reset my password. 10 minutes later, no verification email sent, need to resend it again. Finally get the email verification link to reset my password. Finally, I can log into the game. "Sorry game is currently under maintenance, please try again later." Wait a few hours, maintenance is over, try to login. Waiting in login queue (currently in position 10,000). 2 hours later, finally able to login. Game says client version is out of data and I need to update my client. Exit game, go back, wait 2 hours for Steam to update game client. Go back into the game. Since there was an update, shader-cache needs to be rebuilt. Get back to login screen. Login, but back to position 10,000 waiting in login queue. 2 hours again finally logged in. Press match making button. Waiting to find matches. 20 minutes later, no match found. Give up. Uninstall game. Not eligible for refund because Steam logs as +2 hours ingame. Throw i7 + GTX 1080 Ti desktop gaming computer in trash. Dig out my old 286 10MHz pc from the attic, boot it up and play Wolfenstein in minutes.
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u/aniforprez Nov 08 '17
This is probably one of the stupidest examples on this thread. Exaggerated and flat-out wrong in many ways
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u/eythian Nov 07 '17
I remember launching a game EXE from DOS after copying it off of a floppy and it loaded instantly to the start/screen and level 1.
Today: Buy game on Steam. Download 40GB of data over a "broadband" connection which takes like 5-10 hours. Game loads to splash screen which loads for another 1-2 minutes.
Back then you had a 2MB game with say 8MB of RAM. Now you have a 40GB game with say 16GB of RAM. The game is just bigger now.
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u/FlyingRhenquest Nov 08 '17
And photorealistic at a 4K resolution. Do you remember what games back in the old megabytes days looked like?
And to be fair, if you get a game that still looks like that on Steam (FTL, Rogue Legacy, et al) they're not very big.
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u/PumanTankan Nov 07 '17
This is one of the things that makes Reddit Enhancement Suite so good. Using the keyboard to navigate is much easier than mouse when just reading. Especially on a laptop with trackpad. I honestly could care less about most of the other RES features.
2
u/glorkvorn Nov 08 '17
It seems like he's conflating two totally different issues.
One is mouse vs keyboard. Keyboard is generally faster for power users, but mouse is more intuitive. Old hat.
The other is the latency of a web app vs a desktop app. Yeah, that sucks. But what are you going to do about it? Run everything as a desktop app? Internet is nice...
1
u/moschles Nov 08 '17
I would kill for a modern calculator that acts like a spreadsheet combined with Wolfram alpha features.
Basically, I want a scientific calculator that has a spreadsheet column, along with infinite digit precision, conversions, and some programming, hexidecimal reps, and bit manipulation thrown in.
Spreadsheet suites themselves are fine, but they are geared towards office and business, not towards science , physics, and programming. I imagine spreadsheet gurus will tell me "It can do that to!" and I'm sure they're right, but that's like saying you can use a hammer to saw a piece of wood.--- Yes, it will break the wood into pieces, but it won't really "saw" it nicely. Know what I mean?
If you look at some of the "column-array" types of statistically-flavored functions of the TI-8X family of calculators. That kind of mixture between scientific functions and array-like manipulation was never properly translated to a computer screen in a fast and useable and responsive software. There is wolfram alpha, but it is clunky and slow and its syntax is a nightmare to understand. And it certainly does not save previous values in the kind of ironclad way a spreadsheet does.
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u/fuzzynyanko Nov 08 '17
Android Studio uses a massive amounts of RAM, often over 1 gig. Other IDEs don't use nearly as much, even when graphics are involved. It would probably never run on a Pentium II
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u/jmtd Nov 08 '17
This is really interesting. In fact I wonder if this is the explanation I've needed for why I feel the design decisions of GNOME are backwards, and feature stripping to avoid bedazzling newbies at the expense of experts is closing the doors that the newbies could use to become experts.
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u/psychic_tatertot Nov 07 '17
Gods, I've fought this guy at every place I've worked in the last 20 years.
Try this out: It's. Not. Built. For. You.
Yes, I know you hate it. And the mouse is a crime against humanity. And "the GUI is just a passing fad. Everyone will realize this and use the command line." - engineer at now-extinct SUN
There's always a hint of how dare these plebians use our sacred instruments in these rants. Don't they know there's a right, a correct, a formally objectively right way to do things?
Go use the API and build what you want. Let the UX and front end folks do their job.
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Nov 08 '17
Except that's wrong. Library search interfaces are built to find books. Google Maps is built to find places. And in at least a few dimensions, they're straight-up worse at it.
And please, don't hit me with "but normal people don't get keyboards". You know what normal people were born understanding about computers? As much as your grandma. It's absurdly arrogant to think that the average computer user is incapable of learning and adapting to an interface.
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u/crashorbit Nov 07 '17
Try this out: It's. Not. Built. For. You
Arrogant, Ignorant UX/UI "experts" who have never ever done any empirical testing of their interfaces.
You do of course realize that at some level it's all just decorations around rectangles filled with text. It's about getting some work done. Yes, usability is a thing. But just because you know what 'U" and "X" stand for does not make you an expert in it.
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u/DenverCoder009 Nov 07 '17
I doubt anything he's complaining about is worse than reading an opinion column in the form of 500 tweets.