acrisci

Oh ok I thought you were making the point that "for humans" is a sort of meaningless marketing term, but I see you understand the nuances of this. Sometimes it is good to be "for humans" but you are saying most people in your experience who make the attempt fail.

The classic example I think is Microsoft Access (databases for humans) which is great until it can't do the one thing you need and then it doesn't work anymore. And everyone needs a different one thing.

I disagree. To me this term is a meaningful way to express the values of a project. It means that the abstractions will be at the highest level possible to provide the result. Whenever the library can make a decision for you, it will attempt to do so. It is like you are dealing with a human intelligence that is always guessing what you want and trying to give it to you. When I see "for humans", I expect that the api will behave like a human. This is not always desirable. Sometimes the highest level of abstraction is the wrong level of abstraction. Sometimes you need to be making all those decisions yourself, and you don't want the library to ever guess what your intention is. The human-like apis tend to work wonderfully until you need to optimize, have security concerns, or figure out you're actually doing something novel. Then you jump down a layer of abstraction and everything fits wonderfully again. Sometimes you really are just dealing with a machine and telling the machine what to do and whatever humanity is brought to the task is simply a distraction.

There's a lot of fun projects you can contribute to in the Linux Desktop space. I own the code in the GitHub orgs altdesktop <https://github.com/altdesktop> and dbusjs <https://github.com/dbusjs> and I'm very responsive on issues and pull requests. Another great community is sway <https://github.com/swaywm/sway/> and i3 <https://github.com/i3/i3>.