On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 2:25 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:
On 09/02/2014 01:35 PM, pi zero wrote:
(1) It's very easy to use.
(2) it naturally promotes incremental learning.
I'm sorry, but both of those assertions are not only wrong, but
profoundly misguided.
At first I thought, well, seems safe to assume /we're/ not going to agree.
And of course I still think that. But it sees there may more going on here
than a disagreement about the user experience, in that we may have somewhat
different understands of what we're talking about.
I would be surprised if it represented even a tenth
of a percent of today's Internet users.
This is mostly simple disagreement, but may edge into the second point; my
first thought was that you're giving people too little credit... but on
second thought, I wonder if you're, more specifically, assigning discredit
to people that belongs to accidental characteristics of the interface. And
then there's this last bit:
The only reason templates were a success[1] is because the original
wikipedian self-selected by their ability to grok and
manipulate those
concepts.
[1] Furthermore, even /whether/ templates were a
success is highly
debatable. If I look at the current mess, and the troubles caused by
it, I doubt it. I'd argue that we did great things /despite/ templates
as a mechanism, not because of it.
Now, just incidentally, besides skepticism on the point about
self-selection, I'm also not altogether convinced it /matters/ either way
since the result was hugely successful. But what really gave me mental
whiplash was the apparent supposition that someone here thinks templates
were a success. I'm satisfied we disagree on the manageability of
elementary template syntax, but... templates a success? I'm not sure where
we're talking past each other, but it's happening somewhere.