Frater 219's Journal: The Luser Expounds His Philosophy

The Luser, on the FS/OSS Community:
"Since I got this program for free, I should demand that I be personally trained on it for free, too. My predecessors who taught themselves have an unnatural advantage over me; therefore, they owe me. Rather than being inspired by their example to enter into the struggle of learning, I should instead demand that they cater to me."

The Luser, on Intuitive Design:
"If I do not understand something, this proves that it is either: (a) useless, (b) made deliberately complex so that nerds can lord it over non-nerds like myself, or (c) made deliberately incompatible with my Windows preconceptions out of malice towards Microsoft.

"There is no legitimate reason that anyone would create anything beyond my present ability or willingness to understand; therefore everything not obvious to me is the product of hostile action."

The Luser, on Design Goals:
"Every program aspires towards being a sleek, shrink-wrapped product feeaturing a holographic license card, an obtrusive pseudo-AI 'office assistant', and a user interface that carefully hides from me any setting which would require that I know any fact about my computer or network.

"Any deviation from this goal is a failure on the part of the programmer -- probably due to a character flaw on his part -- and it is my place to point out this failure."

The Luser, on Documentation and User Interface:
"The ultimate form of program documentation, and of user interface, is the 'wizard', which leads me through my entire use of a program with a minimum of explanation on its part or choices on mine. Though once I typed in commands, and after that I clicked on pictographic icons and widgets, today the only direction my computer should require of me is as follows: 'Okay', 'I Accept', 'Okay', 'Okay', 'Finish'.

"Any interface which demands that I read for comprehension, or that I make choices which (a) depend upon specific knowledge or (b) have real consequences, is incomplete and inadequate."

The Luser, on Scripting:
"God forbid that I ever have to write a script for any purpose. However, should that onerous task befall me, there is no reason for me to understand anything before I begin stringing software components together. I do not need to know the format of my input, the nature of components available to me, nor the desired format of my output.

"My goal is to transform ill-understood input into text which, to a cursory glance, resembles the desired output. Complaints from my coworkers -- including complaints about delimiters, spacing, dropped or shifted columns, folded or mangled Unicode, or the inability of other (and thus lesser) software to read my script's output -- are signs that my coworkers have unresolved personal problems."

(The first three sections above were written in response to a Usenet poster who whined particularly indignantly about being expected to read the manual to a piece of complex Unix software before deploying it. I didn't post it there, out of concern that another reader might misinterpret it as being about them.)