Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

We really do live in a dark age. Rather than use WYSIWYGs to take advantage of better formatting and layout, all docs are in the crappiest format, Markdown. Rather than design GUIs using a visual language to quickly mock up interfaces, we manually code out command-line tools. We hand-craft text to style an interface, and have to constantly type, ship, view, edit, ship, view, between people with 3 different skillsets, and reinvent the wheel of application design in an application platform designed for document viewing. Rather than develop and adopt open standards for common tasks, everything has a custom interface, and all interfaces require custom integrations, so that nothing ever works with anything unless someone spends 100 hours tying it together with glue code. And rather than compose code visually in a program that validates it in real time (like CAD), we type out line by line, and use a slew of cobbled together tools and basic tests to check if what we typed has any glaring errors.

With the most advanced technology in the history of the world, we've somehow made it more expensive, time-consuming, complicated and buggy to do things we did 20+ years ago.

Text-based workflow has one significant advantage over GUI-based design: diffability. This enables patch-based collaboration: you can easily share your diff with others, review changes line-by-line, resolve conflicts between concurrent modifications, etc.

Personally, I'm much more comfortable working on large documents in LaTeX compared to Word because I can see every change I make and easily revise/revert it. It's too easy to unintentionally hit some shortcut or button in a WYSIWYG editor that subtly changes the document and not realize it until much later, when the undo stack is useless.

I've written quite a bit of powershell to automate stuff in Word in our docs (pdf generation, hyperlink creation and verification, etc), and I second this. It is awful to work with. I'd much rather have latex, markdown or anything else than WYSIWYG.

Word can show you every change you made, as well as tools like Confluence (which is just a version-controlled WYSIWYG Wiki), and let you diff/revert individual changes.

GUI design diffing is pretty simple too: you collapse a flowchart into a DAG and then diff the changes between two copies of the DAG. It's how you troubleshoot DAG-based software bugs. We could also just make a better way to diff GUI changes, if we tried. It's not nuclear physics...

If people started using GUIs more, then they'd find new problems, sure, but then they'd just make solutions for them. There isn't a problem we can't solve. Except for the problem of changing a culture, like a culture of text. Culture is the hardest thing in the universe to change.

A lot of the issue is just that most visual systems don't work with version control.

The rest is that programmers seem to really like the keyboard only UI.

They seem to think of computers as tools that should do exactly what you say, and that the user should have the whole plan in their head, rather than thinking of computers as devices that help you interactively figure out what you want to do.

Hard disagree with you.

Dark times were when my manager forced me to use GUI to draw diagrams.

I need to convey my thoughts and design. If A related with B - in my head it's "A related to B", not some bubbles in air with different sizes, arrows pixel left, pixel right. Tools like mermaid.js is what makes it beatiful. I describe the design - an it draws it consistent way.

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