Rewinding the Mind

Jeremy Shaw sent me this bit about a DVD rewinder. Very humorous, of course, but there's also a nice little moral about programming in there.

When I was at Linspire, we often got questions from people looking to switch to Linux for the first time: How do I defrag my disk? Where do I buy anti-virus software?

We would explain that Linux filesystems didn't need defragmenting and that the virus problem was virtually non-existent. But sometimes, there was just no reassuring them. IT people sometimes said they simply had to have virus protection software, bought and paid for, because the company had made it mandatory for all computers. We felt a little silly, but we licensed one, shipped it and then they switched.

I wonder how many people learning a functional language wondered how to allocate and deallocate memory like they did in C? Whether the answer is obvious or not depends on one's understanding of the semantics of the language. If you have a model of C semantics in your head and you're looking at Haskell code, you're predictions about what's going to happen are bound to be wrong.

All these are examples of essentially the same problem. If we can't see (or otherwise sense) how a technology works, then a change in the underlying mechanism will leave us confused because our mental models are out of date.

I tend to prefer designs that show a technology at work, such as record players as opposed to most CD or DVD players. Unfortunately, miniaturization and digitalization only make the problem worse. I suppose that's why Hollywood always has been at the forefront of computer graphics, because the audience has no idea what's going on without all the flashing lights.

I will pursue these ideas further in some upcoming posts about functional programming and user interface design.