Sure, W's posts are often troll-like. And I am big fan of computers and open source.

But...

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...there's a small shred of truth in what he says:

computers in general are still too hard to use. For both experts and novices alike.

I mean, you can go to any car rental place in the country, rent a car, and drive it within a few minutes, and it just works, and you never read the manual. Ditto most cell phones, chain saws, refridges, etc. You need the manual for hard stuff -- What should do to my car if I'm planning on leaving it idle for six months while I'm out of the country? but the basic functions just work. Even the complicated stuff, like all-wheel drive and airconditioning, are usually a button to push and the car Does The Right Thing.

Computers simply aren't there yet. Maybe another twenty years, but not yet today.

Computers, for the novice or the expert, take lots and lots of fiddling.

In some senses, the situation is worse for sophisticated users (like perlmonks) because (1) we have higher expectations for what computers can do, and (2) we have more patience with and aptitude for fiddling. You know the posts we can read here along the lines of

Hi! I wanted to automatically SFTP from box Foo into Box Baz which runs a different OS and then grab files in Bulgarian Unicode UTF32 from Baz over a samba share into Beep. Had some problems with line endings, Open SSH vs. SSH.com, but after a few days of fiddling, I got it all figgered out. So anyway anyone know of a good CPAN mod to translate my Bulgarian item descriptions into English? PS I'm running Perl 5.1.01 on my Zire 71.

So we fiddle away, and we're usually smart enought to get it all to work, but at times you have to step back and say, Why isn't all this stuff easy yet? Processors are blazing fast, memory and disk are essentially free (vs. where we were just five years ago) -- cheap computers on the desktop are more powerful than the big iron of a decade ago -- with all this power, why isn't it easy yet?

The early Palms were easy -- good interface, easy to use, simple, robust. Now PDAs are getting more complicated and hard to set up use. And crash more.

And Perl (as a programming language) is a good step in the direction -- thanks Larry for freeing me from being forced to think about memory allocation and searching and ugly IO, freeing me up to work on higher-level more interesting stuff. I can think about the low-level grunge if I need to, but usually in Perl I don't need to. And it just works. And That Makes Me Happy.

IMHO, computers in general are still so hard to use because the computer industry is so young and evolving so fast.

Vs. say, the auto industry, where changes to the internal combustion engine and transmission come along at a glacial speed.

And good installers are important -- I don't WANT to read docs as often as I have to now -- I want to plug things and have them work, so I can focus on my task and my product rather than on my install and the toolkit. (Hurrah for emerge! Hurrah for the standard Win installer/uninstaller!)

So.

W. is often troll-like, yes. And I'm a big fan and supporter of perl and Linux. And I don't mind and often enjoy fiddling with these machines. And I know everything can't (and shouldn't) be reduced to a single button push. And yes, I do read manuals.

But maybe in the next few decades we'll see increases in simple usability. More and more CPU cycles will go towards making computers work better for PEOPLE, and in general that will be a very good thing.

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