I love this article. I understand that this mode of interaction is sort of an outlier, but I have come to personally resent being prevented from doing anything by a computer.
A lot of friends of mine ridicule my choice of Linux distribution and tell me I'm crazy for saying that it's "easier", but I find that a stripped-down version means less arguing with the machine, and far less than one of the two more popular desktop OSs. I was eventually driven to doing a Linux-from-scratch install when, one night at 4 a.m., my pre-packaged Linux distribution started doing something, and I didn't (at the time) know what it was doing or why. I've moved back to a distribution, but one that has the same philosophy of doing exactly and only what I tell it to.
I don't know why it's so uncommon for coders to feel this way; most of my friends and coworkers think I ought to just use OSX, but I don't want to have to convince a computer to do what I told it, I want it to just do what I told it. My usual explanation for my peculiar taste in interfaces to the computer is that "I was not put on this earth to be sassed by machines." I now have a well-written article to point them to.
A lot of friends of mine ridicule my choice of Linux distribution and tell me I'm crazy for saying that it's "easier", but I find that a stripped-down version means less arguing with the machine, and far less than one of the two more popular desktop OSs. I was eventually driven to doing a Linux-from-scratch install when, one night at 4 a.m., my pre-packaged Linux distribution started doing something, and I didn't (at the time) know what it was doing or why. I've moved back to a distribution, but one that has the same philosophy of doing exactly and only what I tell it to.
I don't know why it's so uncommon for coders to feel this way; most of my friends and coworkers think I ought to just use OSX, but I don't want to have to convince a computer to do what I told it, I want it to just do what I told it. My usual explanation for my peculiar taste in interfaces to the computer is that "I was not put on this earth to be sassed by machines." I now have a well-written article to point them to.