Ashamed to be a computer pro

After all these years, how did we manage to make so few things people do with computers actually easy?

I asked this question on a Github issue:

Is there a workaround so that something like this can encrypt without adding trailing newline characters to the secret text?

'pa55w0rd'.Trim() | gpg  -e ...

The answer…

Call via the platform-native shell:

# Unix
sh -c 'printf %s ''pa55w0rd'' | gpg  -e ...'

# Windows (workaround needed to print a string without a trailing newline)
cmd /c '<NUL set /p ="pa55w0rd" | gpg -e ...'

As far as I know it’s a good answer. Both ensure the shell (Bourne, not Bash; cmd not PS) and do what you gotta do to ensure that GPG doesn’t receive extraneous newline character(s).

Ffs. It’s 2022. How come we have failed to make this kind of thing any easier since about 1977? That’s about when I started using shell programs like C/PM. I started with Unix shells on SunOS 3.1 about 40 years ago. How can this possibly be such a gigantic mess?

In many ways these things have gotten harder since then owing to bloat and fashionable variety (zsh, fish, ksh, csh, etc) and a lot of people would blame job security. Maybe that’s part of it.

I’d say the iPhone was the first mass-market general-purpose computer so easy to use that most people aren’t scared to use it without training. That was not true of the Mac or Windows and the rest. Most people struggle with hierarchical file systems so you need to hide that somehow.

Apart from the iPhone and its knock-offs, what else in popular computer tech has been truly easy to use? So easy people can figure out from trial and error with no fear of screwing something up. Or at worst you only need to show somebody once. A real world example of that kinds of easy is opening, walking through and closing a door. Or using the cooker in a strangers kitchen.

The www is a disappointment. We were told it was going to democratize organizing, publishing, and accessing information. Hah! Turned out far too difficult to build good web sites, especially since we need to maintain most information over time to keep it useful, so the web sites need easy ways to make changes over time. The difficulty of doing this itself provided the opportunity to concentrate market power into native apps and portals. I’d argue crummy web apps like SquareSpace and Shopify prove my point.

Complexity favors those with the resources to master it. So complexity isn’t just about job security in computing or other areas of hi-tech. It’s often a big part of how significant players in any given sector can turn themselves into a monopoly, or something close enough. Any sufficiently big technical complexity can contribute—legal, financial, political, regulatory—by turning it into a weapon for achieving what all businesses want: less competition, preferably none.

And we have to put up with whatever comes out of that. Or, in other famous words…

δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.

I am ashamed to have played my part in making this mess.