Re: [DotGNU]flexible for users, or flexible for developers? (wasRe: User Interfaces)

[David Bradley]

Timothy Rue wrote:

> Personally I think trying to clone the "enemy" is inherently flawed at the
> very core or conception level.  But enough people have shown interest in
> doing it that the dotgnu effort exist.
I've wondered why GNU didn't come up with a better technology than .Net. 
Surely with the diverse background of the people involved, something 
could be created.

> I'd like to think it's something along the humanitarian economy depicted
> in some of the star trek series within the "earth" settings (not the
> frengi settings.)
The problem with the Star Trek society, is the question of who enjoys 
being a janitor? How would you feel if "society" dictated that you don't 
have enough smarts, so instead of going to star fleet academy you'll be 
washing toilets. And this is one of the problems I've seen of free 
software. No one seems to want to spend the time to polish it. Crank out 
the core fun technology then move onto the next fun project. So how does 
a "free" society create some incentive for quality of implementation?

> proprietary control. Certainly thru genuine software engineering science
> we will be able to make breakthroughs that put software development ease
> at a level that the general user can find the time and respources needed
> for them to do things for themselves.
You obviously haven't met a lot of users ;-). Most users can't explain 
what they want to do to me in English, much less communicate that in any 
form to a computer. It takes a lot of questioning and an intuitiveness 
on my part to figure out what they want to do. If given something as 
advanced as the Enterprises computer, they'd be hard pressed to instruct 
the computer to do some task. Sure there are users out there that can do 
this, but the majority, in my experience, can't.

David Bradley