grabcocque

You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language?

It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.

Silicon Valley, in particular, has always seemed to me to fetishise the pseudo-legendary brilliant young school leaver overachiever superstar. Anyone who hasn't burned out by the time they hit 40 is clearly either lazy or an underachiever, and therefore not the sort of person we would want to hire.

The Valley's most cherished myths are amongst some of the most societally detrimental.

(Disclosure: I'm 40 and work in tech. This sort of thing gives me waking nightmares.)

Classic innovator’s dilemma. Their first mover advantage has made them complacent.

The edge gestures for switching apps aren’t new, they’ve been on the iPad for some time. The swipe up to app switch/go home is the only new gesture. Anyway my point stands: the home button was a massively overloaded bit of UI and no serious UX person would defend that.

Yes, the people of Earth could never grasp the awesome complexity of a new edge gesture.

Of course the home button was such a simple UX though:

* Press place your finger on it to use Touch ID

* Press once to go the home screen

* Press twice when unlocked to bring up task switching

* Press lock button then press twice to initiate Apple Pay

* Press and hold to talk to Siri

* Press at the same time as the lock button and then release to take a screenshot

Yeah, it was such a SIMPLE bit of UX. If you’re a UX expert arguing for the supremacy of a verb with at least six overloaded meanings, imho you’re UX charlatan.

“The firefighters are all volunteers.”

Yeah, okay. But why?

Youtube are just really, really desperate to kill Youtube by any means necessary these days.