Re: gEDA-user: fritzing

[al davis <ad252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

??? wrote:
> > All the comments about Fritzing vs. gEDA are very true.  It
> > would indeed be nice if gEDA (particularly the gschem ->
> > PCB flow) were more polished and newbie friendly.

On Thursday 07 May 2009, der Mouse wrote:
> Would it?
>
> In many cases I've seen, making something newbie friendly
> results in also making it expert crippling.  I have seen
> exceptions, but it might be worth at least thinking about the
> danger.

Newbie vs expert are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  A 
truly good design will be both newbie friendly and expert 
friendly.  Most software I have seen is neither.

From an educator's viewpoint, so-called newbie friendly software 
that does not evolve into (or provide a path to) expert friendly 
is harmful to education.  We want the students to become 
experts, eventually.

For software to be truly expert friendly, it must use languages 
that are meaningful in the application domain, and lots of 
extendability.  To a circuit designer, that is not C, Scheme, 
M4, or XML.

Software can be newbie friendly with a command line, but that 
seems to have gone out of fashion.  The most critical need for 
something to be newbie friendly is apparent simplicity and 
excellent error handling.  Throwing a GUI on top of something in 
a haphazard way usually doesn't work.

Don't forget the "expert newbie" .. who is an expert in the 
application but new to a particular software package.



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