diversityhire

I remember when Mark Pilgrim was "stalking" Dave "appropriately named" Winer. I haven't read him much since then, but this seems like a lot of his stuff: best if taken with a grain of salt.

He has a point, most software sucks & most people underestimate the difficulty of implementing good software, especially unglamorous software like text editors & word processors. And most of the people who underestimate the difficulty of implementing good software are incapable of seeing how bad their own software really is. Examples that spring to mind: PHP, newLisp, MySQL.

I'm sympathetic to any argument against the flood of "text editors" that are really just skins on top of the Cocoa or .NET text editing frameworks. And I'm incredulous when I see someone write a whole application because they don't know that a feature exists or they don't realize their editor of choice is extensible. The other day I saw a blog entry about a guy who wrote a text editor because he wanted to use his whole 24" screen with as little "chrome" as possibleaEUR"I thought it was a joke.

I disagree with Pilgrim that all of this is a problem. Yeah, most people shouldn't write a text-editoraEUR"even for their own edificationaEUR"because it's enormously hard and the results are going to suck. Efforts are better put into evolving an existing not-quite-optimal program (e.g., AquaEmacs) (where this is possible). But every so often something really revolutionary or great results from somebody doing what they "shouldn't have"... and it's fun.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying & The Sound and the Fury

Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Peter Medawar's The Art of the Soluable

Designed by Peter Saville

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols

Bloom County Babylon