(Disclaimer: I've been on SO since 2009 with almost 200k rep now)
Yes, SO has rightfully earned a reputation for being unfriendly (at best!) to software-dev neophytes; I don't want to handwave-away the problem, but I don't believe SO was intended as a good place for beginners, nor as a place tolerant of _forum faux-pas_[1]; SO was just intended as a better (and free) replacement for expertsexchange - and the disconnected, disparate collection of web-forums or Usenet groups that focused on a single language or platform.
So if I wrote the above post, I think I'd re-phrase it by saying SO was an example of "good _professional_ interaction": the site/format works great when everyone understands each other. SO would be even better if it could solve that problem, but to-date, no-one has figured-out a solution to that problem; whereas if we look at ChatGPT-as-a-replacement-for-SO, it hasn't solved the problem either, but avoids it, by not having people interact with other people anymore - this may or may not be a good thing in the long term.
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[1] e.g. the cardinal sin of posting new threads without checking for existing threads first; putting "URGENT!" in the subject-line; posting with a sense of entitlement; etc.
Have the idioms of Fortran changed much over the decades? Because idiomatic C++ today is unrecognizable to how people had to write for VC++ Win32 until well-until the 2010s.
Yes, infamously so. It was fixed-width at one point.
My humbling Claude experience was pointing at a codebase it took me weeks to get to a good 2003 standard, and watch it do the next fifteen years, cleanup, refactoring, feature additions that needed the tech debt solved I never got round to first, in minutes.
Same thing with control-theory - there’s so much established knowledge out there that one really needs to know but which isn’t taught to kids in uni or even postgrad level. Learning these things on-the-job means you don’t know what you don’t know…
What’s a better way? We still don’t have state-regulation/certification for software in safety critical systems, which terrifies me when I think about it.
We have DO-178C for aviation, which (a) is a pretty good standard and (b) is a heck of a lot better than ISO26262. It's "voluntary", but it's the only game in town, so…
Meh. It's been 3 years and *gestures broadly* so much else of the Windows 11 UX still leaves much to be desired: making the context-menu slightly-less-awful isn't going to bring me back to the fold when so many other aspects of Win11 are not just unappealing, but actually off-putting.
(I maintain that Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users (XP, Win8, Win11); or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else (Win7, Win10), or just bad for everyone (Vista)).
If Microsoft wants me to willingly buy into Windows 12, then I want the option to keep the Windows 10 UI (File Explorer, Taskbar, Start Menu, and Window Management) - I know it can be done in theory[1], I just want proper support.
DaiPlusPlus> Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users; or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else
That's a false choice, and pie menus are the way out of it. The same menu can lead novices by showing them labels, follow intermediate users who know roughly where things are, and get out of the way of experts who flick in the direction without waiting for it to appear. One UI, no "simple mode" and "advanced mode", and the novice turns into the expert just by using it, by self-revealing rehearsal! I went into that and the research behind it upthread.
As I titled my 1998 Xerox PARC talk: "Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus", reviewed here:
> Pie menus appealed to Hopkins because they conform to the rule that the user's attention should not be squandered. A pie menu selection offers direct feedback versus a user selection that brings up intermediate menus. The programmed pie menu ignores users' gestures except the motions to select or cancel. Hopkins uses pie menus because they take advantage of Fitts' Law, which relates fast selection speed and low error rate to the pie menus' large target size and small distance between selections.
The other half is letting users rearrange it themselves, without registry hacks. HyperCard set the precedent in 1987: the user interface was made of the same stuff as the content, so anyone could open it up and change it. Arthur van Hoff's HyperLook took that to NeWS and PostScript and networking: users could build and edit not just their own nested linear and pie menus, but also customize the live user interfaces of running apps, including the SimCity I ported to it, by copying, pasting and configuring scriptable components from "warehouse" stacks. We were taking it all the way to the window frames themselves, with a HyperCard-like window manager where you could build your own frames out of the same parts, a built-in structured PostScript graphics editor you can use in your own stacks, windows with any shape (like my Lava Lamp shaped Cellular Automata Machine), and you can compose your own custom applications inside them.
I also discussed HyperLook and HyperCard with Alan Kay, who said "This work is so good -- for any time -- and especially for its time", and also "I wish he had done a real end-user language for this":
Simon Schneegans's Kando carries that spirit today. Its menu editor is direct manipulation all the way down: you drag and drop items and submenus right into the pie, see exactly where they'll go, and put the things you use most in the directions that feel right to your hand. That's how a power user should customize a menu, and a novice can do it too, because it's just dragging things around:
I took that idea further in MediaGraph, a music navigation prototype I made in Unity for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club in 2010. It has two layers of pie menus.
The first layer is ordinary nested pie menus for editing the content, with live feedback: as you move around the menu that sets a song's size or its "biome" (a cellular automaton growing around it on the map), you see the effect in the world before you commit. Same biomes merge, different biomes compete for territory.
The second layer is the content itself. The songs are laid out on a map and connected by roads, and the map is a geographic, networked pie menu. Touch one song to another -- kissing them together -- to make a road between them, and kiss them again to break it. Flick on a song in a direction and it fires you down the road to the next song that way, like the cannons in Super Mario World. Point at a song and it plays an earcon, click it to play.
Following links, editing links, panning, zooming and flicking are all the same kind of gesture, with continuous zoom and pan and inertia. As I wrote at the time, what I was proudest of was the "Fahrvergnügen" of connecting and disconnecting places by bumping them together, and traveling down the roads by flicking between them, "without creating another mode". The menu editor disappears and dissolves into the content, by replacing hierarchy with geography.
> Intel just doesn't pay their engineers enough, so most don't car
As someone who considered a job at Intel about 10 years ago (including having to submit to a somewhat humiliating panel-style interview) what made me instantly decide that I didn't want a job there was seeing how their office in my area (PNW) was a 1990s cube-farm.
I appreciate that Intel's workplace was (and still is?) egalitarian because _everyone_ has a cube, but today it's just so soul-destroying to lay eyes on.
So I agree they have a very unappealing culture, but it isn't as simple as paying people more (unless it's to pay for an interior designer and carpenters to overhaul their office...).
Please elaborate.
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