Re: obnoxious CLI complaints

> On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 05:09:31PM -0700, Brendan Miller wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Brendan Miller <catphive@catphive.net> writes:
>> >>
>> >> This is what I want to do 90% of the time, so it should just have the
>> >> proper defaults, and not make me look at the man page every time I
>> >> want to use it.
>> >
>> > You learn those idioms.
>>
>> I guess. Is that a good thing?
>
> In general, yes, because most of them exist for a good reason.
>
>> Is the goal of interface design to make
>> it difficult so I need to learn a lot of things, or easy so I can
>> remain blissfully ignorant but still do what I want?
>
> Neither. You cannot get what unless you have specified what you want,
> and for that you have to learn how to say that. Having good defaults is
> very important, but the problem with choosing them is that people have
> different preferences about them. For instance, you wanted the default
> prefix for git-archive to be $myproject. For me, a good default would be
> either $tag_name, or $myproject-$tag_name, or empty (as it is now!). So,
> what you propose is *never* a good default for me. Moreover, changing
> any default will cause a lot of pain for other people who use Git now.
> Besides, writing something like --prefix='' is very ugly. So, the
> current default makes perfect sense.

>> Yeah, I've been reading them. I'm saying that the docs are a crutch.
>> RTFM is the problem not the solution. It makes the user do more work
>> to avoid fixing usability issues.
>
> A usability issue exists when a person knows how to do that, but it is
> inconvenient or error-prone; or when a learning curve is too steep.
> But when someone cannot use, let's say, a compiler, because he or she
> refuses to read to learn the language, it is not a usability issue.