It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy and let someone else do the work
In my experience more often then not the 'not even trying' has nothing to do with wanting someone else to do it, but rather with being scared to mess up exactly because they feel they are not knowledgeable. That's pretty instinctive I think (e.g. the first time I used a chainsaw I was also rather hesitant as I basically knew sh*t about it) but sometimes also driven by the abdunance of horror stories heard about 'losing all mail/photos/....' (which is, given the person's skills, usually actually very hard to do for them).
I agree. I felt that with maths many times - it was fear caused by lack of understanding. "I don't know what it is, I don't know how to bite it, I don't feel the problem, help!".
I have that with software too, sometimes - again, due to lack of understanding. For most of my Java experience, Maven POM files for me were "that fucking pile of shitty XML I'm not touching with a ten foot pole, because it doesn't make sense". I didn't know why it looks the way it does, what any change will do, how to make anything work. I eventually bit the bullet and spent a day reading up on the docs and now I'm not afraid anymore. But it took me some years to first stop avoiding the topic altogether.
> 'losing all mail/photos/....' (which is, given the person's skills, usually actually very hard to do for them).
The thing is, they don't know that. They have no intuition for the range of operations and capabilities of a piece of software in front of them. You and I both know that this program they're using probably won't be able to find user's mail or photos by itself, much less delete anything - nor that anything in its operations comes close to deleting anything. But regular people don't know that, and I think the common factor here is not having an intuition about the limits of space you're moving in.
XML obfuscation layer, semi-declarative runtime that can't be debugged (no breakpoints), weird rules, unpredictable failure modes, arcane config & installation, etc.
Maven is utterly broken and irredeemable. That you rose to the occasion to master it is a testimony to your adaptability and pluck.
I'm not proud of my adaptability; I'm ashamed it took me so long to bite the bullet and read the docs.
I'm actually working on turning it into an instinctual habit - instead of trying to power through the unknown, take a break and read a goddamn book about it. It makes you less productive for few hours or days, but then quickly pays significant dividends. Sharpening the axe, and all that.
I brought up the story to highlight the fact that it was so easy, so natural for me to avoid dealing with Maven altogether for years. If, as a technical person, this is my default reaction to a confusing piece of technology, then how can I expect more from normal people? Conversely, their fears could probably be alleviated with as little as few hours worth of education or at least a good explanation. The trick is to make normal people willing to invest those few hours, when their own curiosity isn't enough.
Yeah i see people happily surf all kinds of sites, but once they need to deal with local files they lock up i fear of making an irrecoverable mistake.
The benefit of youth is that one do not have prior memories of failure and punishment that thus allows one to mess up. One of the first things i did after getting a computer was to accidentally blank the hdd. But after a friend helped me reconstruct the environment i learned how to do same and more. And these days i am the ad-hoc support line for family and friends.
I wonder if the whole GUI is not really helping here. Sure, it allows things like browsers to exist etc. But at the same time all the locations of files and such are mental rather than physical.
back in the day, if i wanted to run a spreadsheet program i had to locate the floppy it was stored on. Now it is stored in one of the many sub-folders that blanket my 1TB+ sized hdd.
A whole lot of problems with home computers seems to stem from them doing a number of things in the background without the user being aware.
I can't help wonder what would come to be if one were to go back to the C64 or similar where if we wanted it do anything we had to start it ourselves.
BTW, there is an old OSNews article[0] from someone teaching basic computer usage to older people. And he claims that he had a fair bit more success with the CLI than the GUI. This because not only was it clear when the computer was doing something (one could not input more commands) but it also gave a history of previous actions, and the ability to set aside tasks for later (with a warning about that on exit).
I can't help wonder if the whole desktop metaphor and WIMP, while making things more "friendly" at first glance (vs that blinking prompt) in the end has just added a whole lot of conceptual thicket to cut through when trying to translate goals to actions.
All in all i wonder what we would get if we had a cli with some gui niceties, like being able to add file names to a command by clicking them in the history of a recent ls/dir command.
> This because not only was it clear when the computer was doing something (one could not input more commands)
Maybe old GUIs were better. You had N windows on screen, meaning N tasks being done. Now you also have to track minimized windows. And tray icons. And programs that run in the background without showing any window or icon at all. And system services, which are different kind of background programs. And I'm probably forgetting something.
Right now, in Windows, I believe the Task Manager is a fundamental tool to understand the runtime state of your system, and it should be advertised as a "normal-user tool", not "expert tool". And I'm talking here about detailed process view[0], and not the dumbed-down view from Windows 8/10[1]. Users can't really hurt themselves with Task Manager anyway (you don't get to kill a system process that easily), and it's fundamental to getting a feel for what your computer does.
Tangentially, the "dumbed-down view" of Task Manager is an example of what I believe is the biggest sin of modern UIs - lying to people. There's hardly a better way to confuse the shit out of users' minds than presenting a limited and inconsistent view of the internal state.
> the ability to set aside tasks for later (with a warning about that on exit).
I wonder how it is this feature was made - both in GUI and CLI - in such a way almost nobody (except sysadmins) use it? I mean, personally I discovered that Windows can do it only very late in my life, and I don't trust UNIX cron. Most people I know - including programmers - don't know about either. Yet delaying tasks seems like useful feature. How come it's not exposed in OSes (and it seems to not exist on mobile at all, from user's POV)?
Sorry, i was not talking about cron or similar. But simply ctrl+z. Keep in mind that while on the surface that is similar to having multiple windows open, the process is suspended and out of the way. Now the user can actively tell the process to resume in the background, or just leave it there until later. And if one was to attempt to log out while having such a process waiting, there will be a warning.
All in all, this is perhaps a closer approximation of a physical workflow than the desktop metaphor.
"Task Manager is a fundamental tool to understand the runtime state"
IIRC, the taskbar and tray are meant to communicate that at all times. But trays were easily overrun as people installed more and more background software on a single PC. Modern taskbars too have become so crowded there are groupings and virtual taskbars for the virtual desktops.
One cause is software unnecessarily running at all times. Another is people do more with their PCs than in times past.
In my experience more often then not the 'not even trying' has nothing to do with wanting someone else to do it, but rather with being scared to mess up exactly because they feel they are not knowledgeable. That's pretty instinctive I think (e.g. the first time I used a chainsaw I was also rather hesitant as I basically knew sh*t about it) but sometimes also driven by the abdunance of horror stories heard about 'losing all mail/photos/....' (which is, given the person's skills, usually actually very hard to do for them).