Creating Interactive Applications While Maintaining Your Sanity

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 23:43:00 +0800

One of the primary reasons computers are so ubiquitous in modern society is their ability to let humans and software cooperate to achieve a desired goal. That is, to be interactive.

Creating interactive applications can be pretty annoying for a programmer. Unlike a computer which is predictable and will blindly follow any instructions given to it,

Humans are unpredictable. They like to press buttons and push features further than they were originally intended
Humans have a habit of asking for special cases (“Feature X works really well, but when I click on this triangle while holding shift and tilting my head at an angle, it should really do Y instead. It’s not a big feature, can you just add?”)
Humans often don’t know what they want, meaning even if you implement something exactly as described to you users will still complain about it not doing the right thing
The real world is messy, and letting users interact with your program is a really effective way of mixing the messy outside world with the nice structured world inside a computer
Also, users are the ones funding your pay check so you should probably try to keep them happy 😁

The ideas and concepts shown in this article aren’t overly advanced. In fact, if you’ve been programming for a couple months (especially if it’s part of a formal Computer Science program) you’re probably already familiar with them.

Interactive Applications on Michael-F-Bryan

Creating Interactive Applications While Maintaining Your Sanity