I was thinking about what’s wrong with Sierra (see my previous post), and I realized that it mostly sounded like someone asked a CS100 student for a list of things they disliked about C. This immediately led me to consider if that’s ever a good idea. Should we ever ask users — especially novice users — about how to improve a product. While my initial reaction is, “definitely not”; my second reaction is more considered. There are times and places where the opinion of experienced users is deficient — they don’t expect anything but what their used to getting. But the danger with novices is that they make short-sighted decisions based on an incomplete understanding of the problem.
It’s moments like these that I ponder the recent success of Apple. Apparently, a couple of people (Jobs & Ive) guided them to the top of the gadget industry based on their insights. It appears to me, what you really need is the input of a few people with very good “taste”. Jobs had great taste in gadgets. Ives has great design taste. To design a new programming language, I’d want the input of people with great programming taste. I have ideas of who I’d ask among my friends, but I wouldn’t go on my tastes. I’m too ingrained in the C/Objective-C camp to be of any use to anyone in terms of new paradigms in programming.
My background and experience tell me that design by committee, or worse design by focus-group, does not produce great solutions. At best, “design by mob”, produces large and possibly diverse solutions. A quick look at most open-source projects/fork-fests shows the results of such efforts.
Any design effort requires two things: great insight and clear leadership. A sufficient amount of one can make up for a minor lack in the other, but eventually both need to be there.
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