Horatio B. Bogbindero wrote:
btw, i am speaking from experience here. i have a number of developers who have
the tendency to "over engineer". it takes a good amount of supervision to ensure
that these "geniuses" stay on course.
anybody have suggestions on how else to remedy the situation?
We should be aware and acknowledge that knowing how to do voodoo coding is
a different skill from engineering good interfaces. In other words,
one can be a master in the black arts of deep hacking, but be a total
klutz at designing usable interfaces (not necessarily GUI) to their programs
(and thus should try to devote some more time towards learning this aspect
of software design).
Analogy: Very smart teachers who know their subject matter in and out but
are inept at transmitting this knowledge to students - overall they are
less effective than those teachers who might not know the subject matter
as deeply, but nevertheless are very good at explaining what they do know.
The guys responsible for the GNU tools (info, autotools, emacs <andy
puts on asbestos suit>, etc...) may be masters of hacking, but frankly, their
tools are among the worst around when it comes to usability. The GNU tools take
forever to learn and tragically this means that a lot of people will never get
to harness all that power. If it weren't for Linux, they might not be as
popular or as de rigueur to know today. I believe Linus chose them because a)
of the licensing and b) because they were pretty comprehensive. NOT because
they were particularly well engineered in terms of ease of use.
Knuth's creations are another example... TeX, Latex, etc... may be powerful,
but their popularity suffers because they are so hard to master. I'm sure
Knuth could've made them easier to use without sacrificing their power,
but engineering user-friendly programs is clearly not his strong suit.
I would say that great coding skills hampered by poor interface engineering
skills generally make for an inadequate programmer overall. Someone who is more
balanced would get much further.
Take Python for instance, while GvR is probably far from being #1 when it comes
to hacking language internals (although he is clearly very very good), he
is, IMO, #1 when it comes to engineering language usability. Hence the popularity
of his creation verus more exotic languages which may be more powerful, but
less usable.
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