Everyone who writes safety critical software should read this

[Chris]

On Wednesday, 30 October 2013 at 21:18:16 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 10/30/2013 11:01 AM, Chris wrote:
>> "Poorly designed firmware caused unintended operation, lack of 
>> driver
>> training made it fatal."
>> So it's the driver's fault, who couldn't possibly know what 
>> was going on
>> in that car-gone-mad? To put the blame on the driver is 
>> cynicism of the worst kind.
>> Unfortunately, that's a common (and dangerous) attitude I've 
>> come across
>> among programmers and engineers.
>
> There are also misguided end users who believe there cannot be 
> any other way (and sometimes even believe that the big players 
> in the industry are infallible, and hence the user is to blame 
> for any failure).
>
>> The user has to adapt to anything they
>> fail to implement or didn't think of. However, machines have 
>> to adapt to
>> humans not the other way around (realizing this was part of 
>> Apple's
>> success in UI design,
>
> AFAIK Apple designs are not meant to be adapted. It seems to be 
> mostly marketing.

Forget about the marketing campaigns for a moment. Xerox (back in 
the day) started to develop GUIs (as we know them). The 
developers later went to Apple. Apple was one of the first 
companies to go for user experience and try to design things in a 
more intuitive way, i.e. how humans work and think, what they 
expect (I know the command line crowd hates GUIs). I'd say that 
Windows is at the other end of the scale. Try to find info "about 
this computer" on a Mac and try to find it in (each new version) 
of Windows. Don't forget that you shut Windows down where it says 
"Start". Ha ha ha!

That said, Apple is going down the wrong way now too, IMO. 10.8 
is just annoying in many ways. Too intrusive, too patronising, 
too much like a prison.

>> Ubuntu is very good now too).
>
> The distribution is not really indicative of the UI/window 
> manager you'll end up using, so what do you mean?

Ubuntu is quite good now UI wise. I recently had a user that 
found everything almost immediately, although she had used Ubuntu 
before nor does she know much about computers, nor does she like 
computers. That's what I mean. Intuitive, i.e. the computer is 
arranged in the way the human mind works. Things are easy to find 
and use.