Reflections after a week of phone support

I’ve heard this quote before, but it has been in my mind this last week or so since I’ve been on the phones sup­port­ing cus­tomers:
“Com­puter pro­gram­ming today is a race between soft­ware engi­neers, striv­ing to build big­ger and bet­ter ‘idiot-proof’ pro­grams, and the Uni­verse, try­ing to pro­duce big­ger and bet­ter idiots. So far, the Uni­verse seems to be winning.”

I also read another blog about user inter­faces in which he talks about the fact that com­puter inter­faces are designed with begin­ners in mind. How­ever, once the user gets over the learn­ing curve, the inter­face is a crutch. He asks a rather tough ques­tion: “So is it pos­si­ble to design a sys­tem that’s suits both begin­ners and pro­fes­sion­als?” No easy answer for that. We could prob­a­bly all rant about how cer­tain imple­men­ta­tions fail, but do we have any­thing bet­ter to offer? (For all my GNU/Linux snob­bery, I must admit the prob­lems with the two major open-source inter­faces: GNOME is too sim­ple and KDE too complex.)

As for “idiots”, I don’t really mean it. The same could be said for every­one dri­ving a car: I cer­tainly don’t know very well how to diag­nose the inter­nal work­ings when some­thing goes wrong. Yet I do appre­ci­ate a work­ing knowl­edge of things. And I can cer­tainly empathize that the trend (rather frus­trat­ing for devel­op­ers) in com­put­ing seems to be try­ing to com­pletely dimin­ish the learn­ing curve, and as usual, that makes most of the use­ful­ness of com­put­ing null and void. (If you don’t know how to use a mouse or to save a file, you won’t be very pro­duc­tive.) Does that mean the learn­ing curve should be a bit higher and com­put­ers demand a bit more knowl­edge before using them? Or does that mean we should all invest in our local com­puter edu­ca­tion center?