It's this time of the week again!


Chapter 11: Interfaces


I like how interfaces are defined as "the ways programs communicate with
humans and machines".
As with anything, we go with the rule of least surprise: “Do the least
surprising thing” because it's easier for humans. Always got to say that it's
for us.
The recommended book "The Humane Interface" sounds like a nice book to
read. I found some notes about it here: http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs092/2005/bell.raskin.pdf

I like that the author still mentions the following, because it's important:

Quote:The Rule of Least Surprise should not be interpreted as a call for
mechanical conservatism in design.

The basic metrics to categorize interface styles are: concision,
expressiveness, ease, transparency, and scriptability.
There's a lot of discussion on the upside/downsides of focusing on each
metric, it's a good review.
Especially Section 6 in chapter 11, it's a must-read classic that lists all the Unix
cli patterns.

One thing that the source, sink, cantrip, etc.. reminds me in the media
world is the audio API of PipeWire: a chain of audio/media processing,
literally a pipeline.

About the Spooler/Daemon Pair: I'm probably the only person that uses
atd as a notification/alarm clock.

On the silence thing, I'm reminded of the concept of application posture.
We don't want parasitic applications.


Chapter 12: Optimization

I guess the overall take-away would be: "Do nothing" (if you can afford to do/not-do so).

On profiling, I'm reminded of POGO.