RE: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

The alternative to designing for a hypothetical idiot isn't
to design something just to please yourself.  The way to
good design (good work in any field in fact) is to aim to
please yourself and a small group of fairly sophisticated
colleagues.  That's what mathematicians aim for; that's
what Leonardo etc. aimed for; that's what the Porsche 911
designers were thinking; that was Jane Austen's method.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find an example of great 
work that wasn't created this way.

Self + sophisticated friends may not be the perfect target
market, but it has the advantage Churchill ascribed to
democracies: every alternative is worse. 

--pg

--- Christopher Barber <cbarber@curl.com> wrote:
> > All three of the reasons you give for why Ada was more
> > expensive (no one used it by choice, no one wrote
> > libraries for it, and no one wrote compilers for it) are
> > just the symptoms of real hackers not liking it.
> 
> Only if you believe that "real hackers" are the only people who make
> business decisions regarding language choice.  I don't believe it. 
> On the
> first commercial project I ever worked on, we were forced to use
> COBOL
> because that is what the client demanded.  This kind of thing is not
> at all
> uncommon.
> 
> > It may have shown up in the DoD's books as "language too
> > expensive" but the root cause was "language sucked."
> 
> I don't know the language well enough to say that, but it still does
> have
> its adherents so it can't be that bad.
> 
> > The "average programmer" is a fuzzy target, and vague
> > aims always lead to bad work.
> 
> Yes, but who says that you have to have only one target prototypical
> programmer in mind?  Designing anything with only one person in mind
> is
> usually stupid, whatever the product.
> 
> If you design a language for yourself, you are least guaranteed that
> you
> will like it, and presumably others like you, but it would be foolish
> to
> assume that everyone will like it.
> 
> - Christopher
> 
> 


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