radiant.matrix

There’s a book by David S Platt titled Why Software Sucks… and What You Can Do About It. Sounds intriguing, no? Mr. Platt has placed a sample chapter online, so I took the opportunity to peruse it. It didn’t take me long to realize that Mr. Platt is approaching this problem all wrong:

Programmers have to have a certain level of intelligence in order to program. Most of them are pretty good at dealing with the silicon chip; otherwise they get fired very quickly and encouraged to take up another profession in which they might possibly benefit society, such as roofing. How can they turn into lobotomized morons when designing a user interface? One simple reason, the same reason behind every communication failure in the universe: they don’t know their users.

Every programmer thinks he knows exactly what users want. After all, he uses a computer all day every day, he ought to know. He says to himself, “If I design a user interface that I like, the users will love it.” WRONG! Unless he’s writing programs for the use of burned-out computer geeks, his user is not him. — Sample Chapter of Why Software Sucks

There’s just so much wrong with this… (read on after the fold)

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Reductio ad absurdum at its finest ;-)

Possibly mildly NSFW (pr0n reference and mild language in audio)

One Lovelace is the amount of force (measured in dynes) it takes to draw a round ball weighing e Troy Ounces down a tube it fits exactly (in air) at a speed of pi attoparsecs/microfortnight.

Like Farads, this is a rather large measurement. Thus, Plan 9 sucks a few mLl, for instance, while your average Microsoft product achieves many Ll.

I’ve been asked not to cite the Usenet newsgroup this came from, so I won’t ;-)