102 karma · joined November 23, 2011
If you're coming from a basic math background, and have no programming experience, then the expression "a = 15; a = a + 1;" would be confusing in any mutable language, because assigning a value to a variable is not equivalent to stating the equality (identity) of both sides.
I would argue that there is an inherent friction between usability and accessibility of information. Adding options to sort, filter, search, or selectively show or hide fields might make data more accessible but result in reduced usability overall. The exact point where the tradeoff happens isn't clear to me, but 37signals tends to err on the side of usability, at the expense of accessibility. Of course, one could argue that in a data-intensive app, accessibility _is_ usability, and vice versa.
The site seems to be catering to two completely different audiences. There's the corporate deciders who will be reassured by the "social proof" logos of Microsoft et al. And there's the 1337 script kiddies who will feel at home with an unreadable color scheme. It seems like many node.js-related sites have this type of unusable color scheme, much like the Flash sites of yesteryear.