Cocoa mail archive
Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
FROM : P Teeson
DATE : Sun May 18 22:38:06 2008
begin rant:
Oh me oh my the poor newcomers to Cocoa. Sorry folks back in the days
of 360 mainframes there were manuals and they were inscrutable.
But if you took the Winston Churchill aproach and spent some blood,
sweat, toil and tears you would probably become a 1/2 decent
assembler language programmer.
Same with Obj- C - if you know C you can grok Obj-C in at most a week
- less if you are experienced. You won't be a master of it for a year
or so of serious programming.
But that's true of acquiring literacy in any field.
Finally in this spoon fed age of sound bytes and simplistic and
thoughtless political and economic panacea's in a world far more
complex that when I grew up (70 years ago)
you newbies to Cocoa need to do what the docs provide you with.
RTFM! and sweat it out. Or else take the blue pill! Sheesh they all
want pay for no work!
rant ends:
On 18-May-08, at 1:56 PM, Michael Vannorsdel wrote:
> Well what can you do. Not sure why but lately many newcomers have
> been showing up and complaining about Cocoa's difficulty. I'm not
> sure if they've done GUI work before, but I remember my days with
> PowerPlant and spending a massive amount of time just creating the
> GUI and the code to back it. Perhaps this is what gave me the
> sense of how much time Cocoa saves. It's easy to take things like
> webviews for granted. I can guess the amount of code Apple wrote
> to back those to work out of the box is pretty massive and
> complicated.
>
> If programming was just drag and drop and clicking some option
> boxes users could just write their own programs. But the fact is
> programming is far more complicated than that (and probably will be
> for a long time) and making such a framework would take a decade or
> more, by which time it would be obsolete and outdated.
>
> For professionals the GUI is a smaller part of development thanks
> to time saved by Cocoa. If I have to write my own controls from
> scratch, I will as it's what programmers do, write code. But I'm
> thankful 99% of the time I can use something from Cocoa that comes
> with much of the code already done for me.
>
> I guess some people are upset Cocoa doesn't do enough, or all, of
> the work for them. I'm more of the people happy Cocoa does any
> work for me at all. If it saves me time, it's a good thing.
>
>
> On May 18, 2008, at 10:41 AM, Jens Alfke wrote:
>
>> "Hobbyists"? I think "professionals" is more accurate — especially
>> since in the early days of the Mac you had to spend hundreds of
>> dollars to become a developer and get access to tools and
>> documentation.
>>
>> I can see your point about obsessive hackers having the stamina to
>> overcome complicated APIs, but any platform vendor's main
>> objective in developer tools is to target professional developers
>> who will create the products that make the platform attractive to
>> customers. "Professional" doesn't necessarily imply a big company;
>> I refer equally to startups and indie outfits, anyone seriously
>> devoted to creating a product.
>>
>> In Apple's defense, the task of implementing a sophisticated GUI
>> on such limited computers was extremely difficult. The top goals
>> were usability, decent performance, and affordable price. That
>> left no leeway for making the APIs themselves easy to use — the
>> niceties we take for granted like object-oriented programming
>> would have used up way too much of that 128k of RAM and 64k of ROM.
>>
>> (Yes, some of the first GUIs were written in the first OOP
>> language, Smalltalk. But the Xerox computers that ran Smalltalk-80
>> cost $10,000 or more; the ones that ran it with any kind of decent
>> performance (the "Dorado") cost $50,000 and were basically
>> supercomputers. They all had ten times as much RAM as the first
>> Mac, and had custom CPUs with programmable microcode optimized for
>> Smalltalk. Even so, performance was much worse than the original
>> Mac, and the GUI was much cruder and harder to use. I'd already
>> been using Smalltalk-80 when the first Mac came out, and the Mac's
>> speed and aesthetics were just jaw-dropping.)
>>
>> Anyway.
>>
>> I have to say I find this whole discussion frustrating. The
>> attitude of some people seems to be that writing computer
>> programs, of arbitrary complexity, should be as easy as using a
>> word processor. That's a Utopian goal at best, and more generally
>> just naïve. Of course we should be trying to make the APIs and
>> tools and documentation more useable; that's a constant task, and
>> a very difficult one, and one Apple's doing a good job at. (The
>> complexity under the hood is terrifying, and it's already been
>> covered up enough that in an hour an experienced developer can
>> throw together an app that fifteen years ago would have sold for
>> $100.)
>>
>> Face it, any sort of serious creative endeavor is hard! There's no
>> way around it. And the hardest part is learning the techniques and
>> tools. If you wanted to build a robot, play Vivaldi on the violin,
>> design a house, paint landscapes, or cure Ebola, you'd have to
>> accept that it would take months or years of serious study, that
>> the tools and documentation would sometimes be hard to use, and
>> you'd have to put up with frustration before you mastered the skills.
>>
>> Why on earth is writing the best GUI applications in the world
>> supposed to be trivial by comparison? Maybe I'm taking this too
>> personally, but I sense a subtext that some people think the task
>> of software design itself is somewhat trivial, more like
>> programming a VCR than like architecture or painting or chemistry.
>
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DATE : Sun May 18 22:38:06 2008
begin rant:
Oh me oh my the poor newcomers to Cocoa. Sorry folks back in the days
of 360 mainframes there were manuals and they were inscrutable.
But if you took the Winston Churchill aproach and spent some blood,
sweat, toil and tears you would probably become a 1/2 decent
assembler language programmer.
Same with Obj- C - if you know C you can grok Obj-C in at most a week
- less if you are experienced. You won't be a master of it for a year
or so of serious programming.
But that's true of acquiring literacy in any field.
Finally in this spoon fed age of sound bytes and simplistic and
thoughtless political and economic panacea's in a world far more
complex that when I grew up (70 years ago)
you newbies to Cocoa need to do what the docs provide you with.
RTFM! and sweat it out. Or else take the blue pill! Sheesh they all
want pay for no work!
rant ends:
On 18-May-08, at 1:56 PM, Michael Vannorsdel wrote:
> Well what can you do. Not sure why but lately many newcomers have
> been showing up and complaining about Cocoa's difficulty. I'm not
> sure if they've done GUI work before, but I remember my days with
> PowerPlant and spending a massive amount of time just creating the
> GUI and the code to back it. Perhaps this is what gave me the
> sense of how much time Cocoa saves. It's easy to take things like
> webviews for granted. I can guess the amount of code Apple wrote
> to back those to work out of the box is pretty massive and
> complicated.
>
> If programming was just drag and drop and clicking some option
> boxes users could just write their own programs. But the fact is
> programming is far more complicated than that (and probably will be
> for a long time) and making such a framework would take a decade or
> more, by which time it would be obsolete and outdated.
>
> For professionals the GUI is a smaller part of development thanks
> to time saved by Cocoa. If I have to write my own controls from
> scratch, I will as it's what programmers do, write code. But I'm
> thankful 99% of the time I can use something from Cocoa that comes
> with much of the code already done for me.
>
> I guess some people are upset Cocoa doesn't do enough, or all, of
> the work for them. I'm more of the people happy Cocoa does any
> work for me at all. If it saves me time, it's a good thing.
>
>
> On May 18, 2008, at 10:41 AM, Jens Alfke wrote:
>
>> "Hobbyists"? I think "professionals" is more accurate — especially
>> since in the early days of the Mac you had to spend hundreds of
>> dollars to become a developer and get access to tools and
>> documentation.
>>
>> I can see your point about obsessive hackers having the stamina to
>> overcome complicated APIs, but any platform vendor's main
>> objective in developer tools is to target professional developers
>> who will create the products that make the platform attractive to
>> customers. "Professional" doesn't necessarily imply a big company;
>> I refer equally to startups and indie outfits, anyone seriously
>> devoted to creating a product.
>>
>> In Apple's defense, the task of implementing a sophisticated GUI
>> on such limited computers was extremely difficult. The top goals
>> were usability, decent performance, and affordable price. That
>> left no leeway for making the APIs themselves easy to use — the
>> niceties we take for granted like object-oriented programming
>> would have used up way too much of that 128k of RAM and 64k of ROM.
>>
>> (Yes, some of the first GUIs were written in the first OOP
>> language, Smalltalk. But the Xerox computers that ran Smalltalk-80
>> cost $10,000 or more; the ones that ran it with any kind of decent
>> performance (the "Dorado") cost $50,000 and were basically
>> supercomputers. They all had ten times as much RAM as the first
>> Mac, and had custom CPUs with programmable microcode optimized for
>> Smalltalk. Even so, performance was much worse than the original
>> Mac, and the GUI was much cruder and harder to use. I'd already
>> been using Smalltalk-80 when the first Mac came out, and the Mac's
>> speed and aesthetics were just jaw-dropping.)
>>
>> Anyway.
>>
>> I have to say I find this whole discussion frustrating. The
>> attitude of some people seems to be that writing computer
>> programs, of arbitrary complexity, should be as easy as using a
>> word processor. That's a Utopian goal at best, and more generally
>> just naïve. Of course we should be trying to make the APIs and
>> tools and documentation more useable; that's a constant task, and
>> a very difficult one, and one Apple's doing a good job at. (The
>> complexity under the hood is terrifying, and it's already been
>> covered up enough that in an hour an experienced developer can
>> throw together an app that fifteen years ago would have sold for
>> $100.)
>>
>> Face it, any sort of serious creative endeavor is hard! There's no
>> way around it. And the hardest part is learning the techniques and
>> tools. If you wanted to build a robot, play Vivaldi on the violin,
>> design a house, paint landscapes, or cure Ebola, you'd have to
>> accept that it would take months or years of serious study, that
>> the tools and documentation would sometimes be hard to use, and
>> you'd have to put up with frustration before you mastered the skills.
>>
>> Why on earth is writing the best GUI applications in the world
>> supposed to be trivial by comparison? Maybe I'm taking this too
>> personally, but I sense a subtext that some people think the task
>> of software design itself is somewhat trivial, more like
>> programming a VCR than like architecture or painting or chemistry.
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Cocoa-dev mailing list (<email_removed>)
>
> Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
> Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
>
> Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
> http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/p.<email_removed>
>
> This email sent to p.<email_removed>
