

Why Spend More than Five Minutes on a GUI? - DaniFong
http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/05/17/why-spend-more-than-five-minutes-on-a-gui/

======
sayrer
Something about these Wolfram posts always sounds like a a shady late night
infomercial to me. I can't quite put my finger on it.

~~~
ahoyhere
I can't find the point of this one.

Was the whole point at the end that we should just code everything in
Mathematica, because it's a great language "in which you can write just about
anything that can be written"?

And that interactive elements are bad? Cuz they're down the slippery slope?

I think he's using those nifty tree animations to distract people so much
they're rendered incapable of reading. (Worked for me.)

And it's total linkbait.

~~~
uberc
Agree it's linkbait. And yes there's a bit of self-congratulatory informercial
about it.

But there's an interesting underlying point at the end about the tradeoff
between high-level application-specific languages and powerful general purpose
languages:

"I would have done that years ago, but there was no tool in existence that
made it possible. 'Possible?' you say. 'Surely it’s possible in C code, or
Java, or Visual Basic, or Squeak, or something.' Well, no, it’s not possible
for me in C or any other such serious environment, because I’m busy and these
are just fun little things. If it’s going to take hours or days to do, it’s
not possible for me to do."

Also, Mathematica _is_ damned cool, if I remember correctly from grad school
days. So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on
the back.

~~~
ahoyhere
> So I don't mind if those guys are a bit prone to patting themselves on the
> back.

I wouldn't care if it there was a feeling of "meta" awareness of the back-
patting.

Eating your own bullshit like it's tasty tasty chocolate, now _that's_ a
slippery slope you have to watch out for.

Getting high on your own supply -> believing your own hype -> eating your own
bullshit == quick track to irrelevency.

Even if it gets you more fanboys.

~~~
DaniFong
Can you give an example of a company that isn't constantly spinning its own PR
story? It's annoying, sure, but I'm not sure it's actually, from a business
perspective, detrimental.

~~~
ahoyhere
The question isn't whether they're spinning, but whether they drink their own
Kool-Aid, or realize that it's Kool-Aid to begin with.

Me, I hype myself, but I also make self-denigrating jokes and meta-references
when I'm hyping. I apply my bullshit detector to _myself_. Example:
<http://tr.im/5bucks>

You may say "Uhh, but you're just a person," but I'm a person with a
readership of about 7500, and another thousand or two on a mailing list, and
I'm working on a tongue-in-cheek "What sucks about freckle time tracking?"
post for my company blog. Because there are parts of our product that really
suck. And we know it.

Here's a reverse case study: 37Signals was a lot more reasonable 5 years ago.
Their blog posts were more actionable, less hype, and more importantly, the
products fit a need and evolved. They kept doing consulting to pay the bills,
so they couldn't escape reality. Reality is good.

Cut forward 4 years, they launch Highrise, a product that was so "less" that
it was practically "nothing" and not usable for anyone. It didn't have any
features people required to actually manage their customer relationships. It
was just an online addressbook with comments.

You couldn't even sort by people with the most recent comments. How could that
help you manage anything?

And they had been talking it up for _months_ , meaning that it wasn't an
addressbook with comments that was developed in a weekend.

There's nothing wrong with their marketing and PR. The only issue is that they
believed their own hype, and really embarrassed themselves with a totally
useless product.

Now, a year later, it's a little bit better, but it's no Basecamp and no
Backpack.

~~~
DaniFong
I should just mention Amy, that I love your work. Twistori is so cool.

But my point is mostly that, despite the bullshit, Mathematica is radically
more powerful for building user interfaces (up to a certain complexity) than
anything I've seen. The self-hype hasn't exactly toned down over time either,
so I'm less certain it's really the bad omen you make of it.

~~~
ahoyhere
Dani, I'm really glad you like Twistori.

I'm also glad if what you say about the eating-own-bullshit is not a problem
at Wolfram Research. (But, last I saw, Mathematica itself had a horrible
interface, beyond the language itself.)

But, on the other hand, I must always strenuously object when someone talks
about "building" user interfaces as if it's a matter of how easily one can
plug widgets together.

Which is what this article is about.

~~~
DaniFong
Maybe it's a problem of language. Perhaps 'user-interface' is the wrong phrase
for what Mathematica enables. It seems closer to 'interactive exploration'.

Mathematica is really intended for general purpose exploration, and in that
task, as well as many others, a 'hacked together' GUI made out of a few
widgets is orders of magnitude more accessible than the raw code. It's not
beautiful, necessarily, and it's not necessarily well-designed. It's not
likely to replace the detailed, careful work of master designers.

But it does succeed at placing extraordinary power at one's fingertips. When
the elements simply work together, and the data can be simply, easily, and
quickly plugged into to a display function and a manipulate function in a line
or two, it opens really exciting new possibilities.

~~~
ahoyhere
Sure, I agree with you. Makeshift interfaces surely have their place and I was
duly impressed by the demos. They are fucking cool, and cliché, I'm not
typically interested in higher math unless it's showing me insights related to
me earning money.

But.

This is all well and good, unless you title linkbait "Why Spend More than Five
Minutes on a GUI?".

It wasn't "Build a Nifty Mathematical Experimentation GUI in 5 Minutes in
Mathematica," or even "Build a Nifty GUI in 5 Minutes in Mathematica," or
"Explore Math! 5 Minute GUI," any of which would have been accurate and still
interesting.

Instead, it appeals directly to the base (and incorrect) belief that so many
developers have, that UI is an unimportant afterthought that can be dispensed
with, if they only find the right combination of readymade widgets.

In 5 minutes!

Ugh.

~~~
DaniFong
_nods_

Okay. My bad for the title. I just used the title of the article itself. It
didn't occur to me that it would provoke, but I see that amply now.

~~~
ahoyhere
Oh, I didn't mean YOU you. I meant the original author. :)

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tocomment
This is exactly the problem I designed <http://utilitymill.com> to solve .. at
least for me. An easy way to slap a web GUI on a cool python script and share
it with your friends.

~~~
shaunxcode
dude - that is sweet! have you posted this on hn before as an article?

~~~
tocomment
Thanks, glad you like it! It was on HN about 1.5 years ago. Maybe I should
resubmit it. Maybe Reddit programming too. I was hoping to do some kind of
freemium model someday, but I figure I'd need 10-100x the users first.

------
critic
My attention span ran out after a few paragraphs, but I think he's advocating
DSL for GUIs. If so, I'm 100% in favor of that, as I've been saying for a
while.

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staunch
I think this kind of thing is exactly where Flash _is_ really good.
<http://www.25lines.com/>

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rincewind
It shouldn't be that hard in Squeak + Etoys. Drawing things interactively and
hooking up dials to them is the Standard Etoys tutorial.

------
ahoyhere
Another underlying fallacy here is the assumption that "an interface" is
nothing but a limited, predictable set of widgets that are simply stacked on
top of programming underpinnings to "expose functionality."

That is why your interfaces suck!

