Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Fri, 11 Oct 2024 17:59:46 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

I've always said that computer systems should be ugly and boring: ugly
as in not cluttered with eye candy that only gets in the way,
and boring as in it Just Works without any unpleasant surprises.

Depends on what you use them for. My smartphone and laptop are “computer
systems”, as is the workstation I’m sitting in front of right now. They’re
in my face all the time, so I don’t want them to be “ugly and boring”; I
want them to be a joy to use.

The servers that I am responsible for run boring Debian Stable
installations, but even they are not really ugly (noisy and hot, yes, but
that’s another matter); the server makers decided decades ago that they
had to hire industrial designers to make their products look at least
minimally photogenic, so photos of racks and racks of blinkenlights were
actually worth taking, and using to spice up boring articles and
presentations, instead of making them even more boring.