In order to truly democratize access to computers, you must meet your users where they are. That means you have to put in a lot of hard work and abandon your academic elitist norms of "elegance" in favor of empathy. The real world is messy, your users have messy minds, so your software is going to be accordingly complex and messy. Embrace this. Your users will be better off for it.
Empathy is inimical to the Unix philosophy. "Do one thing and do it well" forces the user to cobble solutions together out of the tools they have lying around, and not all of them can do this. This causes stress. The empathetic programmer seeks to minimize stress by putting everything the user may wish to do within their reach, the unempathetic programmer just doesn't care. If you can't understand the system on its own terms, well, sucks to be you. This creates a hierarchy of haves and have-nots: power users, hackers, and the l33t who can engage with the system on its own terms, and "lusers" who cannot engage with it meaningfully at all, which suits the power users just fine -- that's the endgame of Unix-philosophy fundamentalism.
Nazism and fascism are political philosophies embraced by unempathetic people, so it's no surprise when a bunch of empathy-deficient Unix-philosophy hardliners also turn out to be Nazis.
In order to truly democratize access to computers, you must meet your users where they are. That means you have to put in a lot of hard work and abandon your academic elitist norms of "elegance" in favor of empathy. The real world is messy, your users have messy minds, so your software is going to be accordingly complex and messy. Embrace this. Your users will be better off for it.
Empathy is inimical to the Unix philosophy. "Do one thing and do it well" forces the user to cobble solutions together out of the tools they have lying around, and not all of them can do this. This causes stress. The empathetic programmer seeks to minimize stress by putting everything the user may wish to do within their reach, the unempathetic programmer just doesn't care. If you can't understand the system on its own terms, well, sucks to be you. This creates a hierarchy of haves and have-nots: power users, hackers, and the l33t who can engage with the system on its own terms, and "lusers" who cannot engage with it meaningfully at all, which suits the power users just fine -- that's the endgame of Unix-philosophy fundamentalism.
Nazism and fascism are political philosophies embraced by unempathetic people, so it's no surprise when a bunch of empathy-deficient Unix-philosophy hardliners also turn out to be Nazis.