No. Disagree.

Post #202,766 by broomberg 4/10/05 11:26:03 PM Reply	No. Disagree. Programming is FAR more art then engineering. It is constructing in your mind ethereal bits and pieces of "code", which then translate into something in the real world that MIGHT munge data, interact with people, interact with other program, interact with hardware, etc. Reconfigure it, and it does something totally different. Make it command line driven, or control file driven, and it behaves differently every time it is invoked. This is NOTHING like real world contruction. While people would LIKE to have a toolbox approach, they quickly dead end. And then they find the toolbox "programmers" are just the contruction worker code monkeys, while real programmers use their imagination and experience to construct something no one else could envision, ie: ART! And yes, these people (myself included) will usually never be able to come up with a good user interface. Usable, possibly, but good, probably not.
Post #202,770 by Andrew Grygus 4/10/05 11:53:01 PM Reply	And the art goes way down into the hardware. Even most computer savey people are unaware that there are no such things as "digital devices". All are analog (over)driven in such a way they emulate digital devices, which makes design a lot less certain than many would suppose. Add that every silly nanometer of wire or board trace is a delay line and it becomes really fun. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #202,772 by ubernostrum 4/10/05 11:53:51 PM Reply	I never implied there was no 'art' And neither did mpt. Just that UI design is a completely different sort of art, much as good engineering and good architecture are two completely different sorts of arts. \r\n\r\n Which gets at the main problem with usability in Free/open source software: it's written by programmers, and so the interfaces tend to be the sorts of things only programmers find useful. --\r\nYou cooin' with my bird? \r\n[link\|http://www.shtuff.us/\|shtuff]

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