Same with the people I help technically at work. They're all brilliant scientists. They get confused by the difference between VGA, DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI. Or get extremely frustrated when a button on the UI moves.
I think software developers don't quite understand how big a deal it is to a 70 year old when the button to do something moves. Probably a quarter of my day is often just figuring out how to reconfigure things to their liking or else spend an hour retraining them because of some unnecessary UI change in Windows 10, after which they will still forget and ask for help again.
God forbid you break apart an application into multiple programs or have online activation or a license server. I think I hear at least a daily rant about how you can't just buy software anymore and now you can only rent it for a bit.
We have versions of software that are 13 years old because the publisher switched from an unlimited permanent license to a per-seat per-year license model. Rarely worth it when the instructors get confused by new software anyway.
Back when there were RS232 (aka 9 pin) connectors on PCs, my dad's computer had two mail connectors, one CGA and one serial port (I think it was a serial port, but I'm not sure, as those connectors were usually female). I took the VGA cable and accidentally plugged it into the serial port. When I turned on the computer, I heard the startup chirping noises, the screen was black for a few seconds, and then white smoke started pouring out of the power supply. I turned it off REAL fast :) Somehow the computer still worked after that.
EDIT: changed VGA to CGA
I don't see how that's possible without really crushing it in there. Also, CGA & EGA were the same connector as serial (DE-9), which would've been easier to confuse.
It could've been worse: I knew a guy in high-school who plugged a parallel printer into a Mac classic's SCSI DB-25 (the same physical connector as a parallel port, female on the computer; DB-25 serial is a male connector on a PC) and baked it into "apple pie" with that "lovely" magic smoke aroma.
My 84 yo mother was technically competent. Currently has mid-stage dementia. Long term recall still remains impressive. Apparently unable to learn new skills, habits.
Every software update is cleaving a few more things from her life.
My siblings and I thought upgrading her to an iPhone was a good idea, some years ago. Initially, sure. But now I wish we had a snapshot of her tech stack from her early 70s, and found a way to keep that working.
It would've been impossible to do this with commercial software as basically nothing has a 25+ year old support life. Because everything is open source, nothing needs to change.
The gesture controls Apple implemented starting with the iPhone X are also very confusing for an Android user, eve though I also use gesture controls on my S10.
But in the end, you'd get used to it as you did with Android.
I have paired up with some terrible programmers, with bad coding habits, weak knowledge of their ecosystem and no capacity for any kind of architecture design, but that eventually did better than me because they worked way more, and were more persistent.
This idea that bad code will waste productivity is not that important if one person accepts to work 30 hours more than you every week, including to fix the mistakes they introduced by writing said code in the first place.
If you can produce something working that satisfies the requirements you can't be terrible in my book, no matter what I think of your style
Agreed on the levels of complexity in basic apps nowadays.
Last time I stumbled on an "io game" built this way, the lack of WASM debugging tools made it very hard to hack at the game :(
Of course, people would say "what's the point" when JS is a thing and widely supported. I wonder if there'd be a) a compelling improvement in performance and b) a compelling improvement in reliability if we just wholesale replaced it based on lessons learned? I reckon even just keeping JS and eliminating implicit coercions would be a huge improvement (as well as maybe automatic semicolon insertion) and reduce the debugging times considerably.
I don't know about "less quirky", but Microsoft tried with VBScript. Google tried with Dart. Initially, Dart meant to be interpreted by the browser (not transpiled to JS). I'm sure there might have been similar, smaller projects, but Javascript-in-the-browser has momentum that's hard to beat.
I'm trying my best :D
<link rel='stylesheet' href='res/lettercrap.css' />
<link rel='stylesheet' href='res/style.css' />
In all my personal projects I just copy-paste past CSS from existing projects of mine to new ones, at most just changing two or three colors.