Re:Why programmers will never be the brightest and the best
by jasonkostempski on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @04:30PM
(#13879491)
I think a more descriptive, more accurate, less catchy phrase would be "The stakeholders - the ones utilizing the results of your software - don't care how the results are created as long as they're easily accessible, accurate and timely. And don't forget, developers are users too, often the way something is written or the way it behaves at a lower level is actually important to them."
Re:Why programmers will never be the brightest and the best
by scandox on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @06:51PM
(#13880655)
I'm definitely guilty of stretching a point. He probably is not insulting users. Your interpretation is likely the more accurate one.
But the key thing I was reaching (or stretching) for is that my reading of his text is that he really wasn't worrying about users - he was just struggling to figure out why he hated something he'd obviously had a lot of affection for previously.
To me it's a progression that makes a lot of sense, for the reasons I outline in the blog post. But of course it is just a hypothesis.
>> “The users - the one who just want to see a webpage - don’t care.”
> Yeah users. Those passive consumers of stuff. How he loves them.
I don't think you've got this right, here. When Dahl says that users don't care about those things, he's not insulting users. It's true, they don't care about those things. But that's not a criticism; why should they care about them? They've got their own things to worry about, their own concerns and goals and none of them are served by having to care about the morass that we've created. You're reading it as "users don't care because they're too stupid to know that this stuff is important", Dahl meant it as "users don't care because how dare we waste their time with this shit?"