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Comment by EEMac | Hacker News Reader

Part of this is because the sensors are winning.

Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this. Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are.

Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it easier for us to learn new things.

But we're only 30% of the population. Blame whatever trend you want: phones, touch screens, microcomputers, Eternal September . . . we've been increasingly outnumbered and out-spent by the 70% as time goes on.

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Where do these terms and figures come from? I’ve never heard them terms before but it’s an interesting framework with which to think about different peoples experiences with UIs. it strikes me that most people probably exist in both categories to some extent : even hardcore sensors will probably know and expect consistency some from apps, eg. some keyboard shortcuts (ctrl c, ctrl v etc) whilst some intuitives will have strong mental maps of certain pieces of software (games where creating such a map is often a path to mastery, or in my case adobe illustrator which is a UI train wreck but with which after 20 years I find it very hard to be as productive with anything else)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

Huh I never really thought about that. I try my best to make certain keybindings do similar things when I get the ability. (The fact that Ctrl+Backspace isn't back-delete-word everywhere is maddening.) But I never assume any two applications will behave the same way.

I get so confused whenever my coworkers try to "feel" their way around some cli tool by trying different commands and options when I just jump straight to the manual.

Not all programmers are intuitives; there are a great many who are sensors who lack a mental model of how their device operates or how the software they're interfacing with at a DSL or API level operates.

They have a mental map of commands and structures for everything they make, and make "new" things by following examples of new maps. Ie, copying code from SO.

I don't think programming by rote is actually possible past a relatively low threshold. Code is relatively delicate, so just "add strings to files; invoke" is not going to work for most strings.

It's note by rote, per se, so much as it's adaptive pattern matching.

I wonder if "sensors" tend to work more in legacy code. no matter what I need to do at work, something similar probably exists already in the code somewhere. first step is almost always to find that similar code, copy-paste, and tweak it until it works. if you try to get too creative, you get bitten by some weird edge case that would have been handled if you just followed the pattern.

I suspect that user interfaces that feel like sugary garbage to us are totally fine with them. To them it's all the same.

Newly realized sensory here. I both wonder and desperately don't want to know how you feel. I don't think I could even function if I couldn't have a separate mental manual/muscle memory for each app.

Some people even have muscle memory for different keyboard layouts at the same time!

I know I used to switch pretty seamlessly between US International and ABNT-2[0] but others use Dvorak, Colemak and what have you which is obviously orders of magnitude harder...

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_keyboard_layout

I had a totally bizarre experience when I tried learning dvorak and gave up halfway. I found that it temporarily broke my ability to type at all and I became computer illiterate for a day. It was quite surreal. Some months later I learnt Colemak instead and found I was automatically keyboard-bilingual. My brain must have done some rewiring from my first experience. Now I can touch type naturally in Colemak, and still roughly type in qwerty (I learnt colemak because I originally sucked at typing and wanted to start fresh.)

I don't think sensors are "winning".

I probably could fall into that category; I use Gold Wave v.4.51 for aduio editing (instead of, say, Audacity) because I've been using it since year 2000, and I know where things are.

The thing with modern software is that it tends to update and move things around. Things don't only have different semantics, but also buttons in different places.

The downward spiral of UI/UX is not due to users, sensors or not. It stems entirely from the disregard for ones.

And don't even get me started on latency, which is a whole another can of worms.

Please explain dd then.

The Unix command? It was parodying the IBM JCL statement.

Datenduplikator, data duplicate, duplicate data, dump data, data dump?

Due diligence, Danny DeVito, double dare, direct debit?

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