Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
...and an equally as often, geeks will think they know what is best, even when they don't.
It's rarely a matter of taking easy over best. It's a matter of understanding that in many cases, easy is part of what makes something best, and other factors pass a clear point of diminishing returns.
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I actually meant, not only in coding; life and decision-making in general. Look at almost any decision-making process. Hell, listen to some friend when they tell you that they have a "hard decision" to make. Nearly all the time, the choice boils down to "what I
should do" versus "what I really
WANT to do." A huge majority of the time, the latter wins out, having been rationalized to smithereens, and turned, through some pretzel-like contortions, into "what's best." When it comes to using Word (or any other text-creation tool), I hear this all the time, the usual bit being "I need the time to write, I can't take days to learn how to use this program," or, "it would cost me more in time to learn this than it is to pay you to clean it up," or some variant. It doesn't matter that if they learned to use the program properly, it would save them hours and hours of lost time; it's simple rationalization. It's easier not to take the effort and the two hours or so to learn it, so they don't, and then explain at great length why they don't. What usually really slays me, though, is when they then tell me that they are "good at computers." Believe it or not, that's exactly what the person from Friday (the one with the bollixed file associations, who thought that you pushed a button in Kindle Previewer which would "send" the file to KDP--which s/he had already set up, for one book, mind you--and that ADE was going to go WITH it to the KDP and mess up his/her book.).
Or pay attention at any entry-level civics organization. Whether it's a homeowner's association or a town council, etc. Same thing. When you try to get anything done, what's easiest (or best for that individual councilmember) will win out over what's best (or harder) for the town, etc. It's behavior not limited to tech. Politics in most countries isn't screwed up by accident or sheer coincidence...it's human behavior.
Quote:
I learned to code in the days before GUIs and IDEs, but I embraced both. They make me more productive, and allow me to better meet the business needs of my employers, and in the type of apps I write, any less-than-optimized code they generate is totally irrelevant.
For text document creation, in my book (hehe...book pun), WYSIWYG is King. Easy IS best!
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Well, not really sure what the GUI discussion, and when you learned to code, has to do with Word, or whether people will learn to use a product or not, but, okay. And, yes, WYSIWYG is great, but off the top of my head, I can't think of an ebook-making program, a real one, that works that way. I suppose it could be argued that iAuthor is WYSIWYG or WYSIWYW...
Hitch