RE: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood

["S. Alexander Jacobson" <address@hidden>]

On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Paul Graham wrote:
> 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.

Its just a question of what market you want to hit.  There are  lots of
examples of successful products designed for a market rather than the
owners of the companies that created them:

Cars: The Ford Model T
Food: McDonalds
Beverage: Coca-cola
Software: MSFT Windows
Clothing: Blue Jeans and Khakies

Creating great art may place you in history.  But creating great
products makes people happy today.

-Alex-

___________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson                   i2x Media
1-917-783-0889 voice                    1-212-697-1427 fax



> --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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