David Gelernter
I thought this was going to be more of a look at HCI, but instead it’s beating the drum for beauty and technology. Preaching to the choir a bit, as I’ve already decided the issue for myself. Being written in 1998 dates it a bit, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Complexity makes programs hard to build and potentially hard to use; beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. 22
“to hell with mathematics; let’s teach our programmers about beauty” is what we ought to hear. 27
The mark of a well-designed interface is that, as soon as you see it, you immediately form guesses about how it works, and the guesses turn out basically to be right. 88
Lifestreams as diary (111) – I think this is really what I’m going with this here website. It’s sort of a slice of what I’m about right now. I’ve cut down ‘past’ by only putting one article on the main page and making it a bit of a pain to go back through old stuff. But just a quick portrait of myself through the things I’ve said/linked/listened/done lately.
Great technology is beautiful technology. If we care about technology excellence, we are foolish not to train our young scientists and engineers in aesthetics, elegance, and beauty. The idea of such a thing happening is so far-fetched it’s funny – but yes, good technology is terribly important to our modern economy and living standards and comfort levels, the “software crisis” is real, we only get from our fancy computers a tiny fraction of the value they are capable of delivering: we are a nation of Ferrari drivers tooling around with kinked fuel lines at fifteen miles per hour. 129