Amen

Amen.

Amen.

Amen, Amen, Amen.

Aaaaaamen!

The mangling of what should be proper, full sized, inverted-T cursor keys is one of the most damning usability and user experience things of recent years. First the arrow keys got shortened to be half-height so they could fit them into one row. That was bad enough. But then the real kicker that I just cannot fathom is when they made the left & right arrow keys full-height, and had the up & down arrow keys half-height inline on the same row. This meant there was no negative space to afford touch feedback, which meant it was a lot harder to find and use the keys without looking at the keyboard, and that even when using them one could easily get off-by-one or more.

Ok, well, then the extra double-plus serious freakin' kicker to that kicker is that not only is this happening on business laptops, but... shudder... on (so-called) gaming laptops. The sky truly is falling.

My kingdom for a product team that really gets usability and ux. Google Docs doesn't. Reedsy doesn't. Microsoft Office Online/365 doesn't. Zimbra doesn't. Even (seemingly) "simple" things like Slack and Gmail screw the pooch. It is as if nobody ever uses their own products or somethin'.

There's this thing that software developers seem to do: they seem to invent all sorts of alternative ways of doing the same thing, and those things all come together to make getting anything actually achievably done well-nigh impossible. Or at least really depressingly tricky and laborious and painful and error-prone and slow.

For example, all the different ways there are to build a Java/JVM based project. Makefiles, Ant, Maven, Ivy, Leiningen, Gradle, Eclipse, Intellij, NetBeans, et. al. (Or, say, all the ways to try to build a JavaScript thing using modules.)

The fundamental epic fail of it all is that pretty much none of these things support a layer of meta abstraction and introspection that would let us actually debug them. These systems commit a cardinal sin of programming ux: being only a write-forward system with no closing of the loop via debugger tools. I have no way to know what thing I need to adjust in order to get my build to work. If you search around for people trying to solve similar problems, you will see a ton of trial-and-error crap. ("It worked on my machine." "I don't know what I did, but suddenly it started working." "Try uninstalling and reinstalling." etc.)

The fact that this kind of development environment doesn't seem to make anybody bat an eyelash and wonder, "is there a better way?" makes me so utterly steam-coming-out-of-my-ears hopping mad - and depressed.

Being a software developer is clearly a sign of being either a masochist, or a sadist. There are no other reasonable conclusions.

Oh, wait. Unless you are an apologist. In which case I sorta atheistically still hope you've got a nice warm circle of hell waiting for you.

JavaScript so-called modules are the worst thing I've ever seen, because the resolution strategies are all really horribly bad ux, and because people continue to multiply the insanity seemingly every 6 months with some new slightly different approach to it all (systemjs vs. node vs. amd vs. etc.; webpack vs. babel vs. etc.) and then enough people seem to get on board with each insane little thing so that we end up with a nightmare of half-assed explanations about any given one, lots of hand waving, and me just getting nowhere. All I bloody wanted to do was spend 15 minutes actually writing code that freaking did something, but instead I am still dead in the water because of this utter insanity. Dust off and nuke the place from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!

Modules and namespaces and all that stuff in Typescript is a complete train wreck. I guess the JavaScript ecosystem is like 80% to blame for it, but Typescript does nothing that I can see to actually sanitize it so that there's any concise, good, rhyme or reason to it all. What a crock of junk the entire JavaScript ecosystem is. You can't put lipstick on a crock of poo and get anything other than poo wearing lipstick. I am hitting some weird compiler thing where adding imports breaks some code that was working fine. Looking in the Typescript issues shows at least a zillion things that are apparently wrong, or at least confusing, about the whole thing. Like: oh my freakin' g*d.