Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Mon Sep 2 07:09:42 PDT 2013


On 2 September 2013 23:36, Joseph Rushton Wakeling <
joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:

> On 02/09/13 14:51, Dicebot wrote:
>
>> But do you seriously expect anyone with no personal business interest to
>> work on
>> brining more of such crap into something that is not broken? You would
>> have had
>> my sympathy but demand "Let's force everyone to use IDE" is just insane.
>> All
>> this thread would have made some sense if some enterprise D entity has
>> existed
>> but it simply does not work that way right now. And, to be honest, I am
>> glad
>> about it.
>>
>
> Personally I find, observing a number of different open source projects,
> that a very typical problem is a kind of "selection bias" among
> contributors that leads them to significantly under-appreciate the
> usability problems of their software.
>
> It goes something like this: anyone who has spent any length of time using
> that software (which of course includes most contributors) either had a
> workflow and toolchain that the software matched with, or they have been
> able to adapt their workflow and toolchain to enable them to use the
> software.  Usually they have managed to find ways of coping and working
> around any other usability issues that arise.  And that situation then
> compounds itself over time because new users come and either adapt in the
> same way that existing contributors have, or they leave.
>
> So, you wind up with a body of contributors who often have much in common
> in terms of their setup, their perception of the priorities, and in their
> ability to handle the software.  And that in turn can be very dangerous,
> because you get people who simply don't understand (or have any way to
> experience) problems that are brought to them by new users or by others.
>
> And of course there are always greater problems than usability, so those
> problems are the ones that get focused on, with the developers all the
> while bemoaning the lack of manpower and wondering why it is so difficult
> to attract and hold on to contributors.
>

I think this is a very interesting point.

The only way that I can see to avoid that trap is to have a strong focus on
> usability as part of your development process, to make sure that developers
> have good connections with a diverse range of potential users and their
> experiences, and (where possible) for developers to dedicate part of their
> time to actually trying to undergo that experience themselves.
>
> The TL;DR of what I'm saying here is: while it's certainly crazy to force
> D contributors to use IDEs, there's a great deal of value in making sure
> that a good number of contributors regularly get IDE experience, and
> regularly try out "fresh start" installs of D in IDE and non-IDE
> environments, because that way you have a sense of how easy or painful it
> is for new users to get things installed and just get hacking.
>

Thank you.
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