Experts

2007-05-28

So far, so old. I haven’t really added anything to the discussion yet.

What I found interesting about the blog entry that I linked to above was that the author decided to ignore the more vocal CLI proponents as trolls from now on. Personally, I’ll include vocal GUI proponents as well in my list of people to ignore. Which finally brings me to the topic I wanted to write about, that of so-called “experts”. You see, I’ve written all of this stuff just to start a rant of my own.

The problem with these GUI and CLI trolls, as I see it, is the same problem as with all experts. I’m not talking about people who have gathered a lot of expertise on a subject, I’m talking about people who claim to be experts. Admittedly, the two groups can overlap, and even where they don’t, the edges are fuzzy at best, because experienced people may still fall prey to experts.

This is all really about herd mentality, which I’ve used in arguments before. It’s my firm belief that a lot of experts merely follow the herd, and since we’re all prone to herd behaviour, there isn’t very much to blame them for.

CLIs came before GUIs, that much is undisputed. I remember GUIs being hailed as superiour interfaces to the traditional CLIs for various reasons, some good, and some (in retrospect) bad. At the same time, I imagine some clever people realized that GUIs had disadvantages as well, and resisted the urge to move to GUIs as the save-all solution. Immediately you’ll have two camps, both arguing their side. In the beginning, I’m fairly certain that the arguments were fairly balanced on either side.

But when you have two opposing camps, it’s usually extremely hard for them to reconcile their differences. That may be due to some people in one camp or the other drawing a benefit from their camp winning, and thus promoting the conflict. Or it may be that a different kind of people get attracted to a camp, that is people who don’t like change much – in which case they’d voraciously defend CLIs, because, after all, they’ve worked well enough for them, so they must be good enough for you, young whippersnapper.

Either way, once two sides argue against each other, it’s fairly hard to keep the sides from drifting apart further. After a while, the voice of reason that proposes a hybrid approach, a compromise, gets lost in the general uproar.

Now with the CLI vs. GUI argument, the GUIs have obviously won. There aren’t many computers that are shipped today with a CLI-only operating system. In other words, GUI proponents can be relatively quiet – CLI proponents on the other hand, must become even more aggressive in their arguments in order not to be pushed into marginal importance. That’s the perfect breeding ground for experts.