World Airmail Links

It takes a while to really understand any abstraction in our modern society: how currency works, why we try to separate church and state, how a bicameral legislature acts on the will of the people, how interest compounds.

…[U]nlike laymen, programmers are regularly challenged with new ways of abstracting information (be it entire programming paradigms, new frameworks, or just a new way of factoring their own code) and eventually become adept at this meta-skill.

But regular people don’t have to learn new abstractions on a day-to-day basis. Anything presented to them in a new symbolic or abstracted way is bound to cause confusion for a long time. Especially second or third order abstractions.

— Dan Grover, Toward a Grand Unified Theory of n00bs

Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

— Fraser Speirs, Future Shock [via Marco Arment]

Good design will make a product understandable

— Dieter Rams, Ten principles to good design

When simple things need instructions, it is a sign of poor design.

— A Rule of Thumb on Judging Design from Dean Sheridan

Note to programmers: The only people with a good enough abstract memory to use this hack are other programmers.

— Bruce Tognazzini, Restoring Spring to iPhone Springboard, quoted not because of the specific hack he is referring to, but because the statement can apply to so many annoying things programmers do