People try and use software without learning how. It’s a fact. People expect to just be able to use a computer program. Just like that. If you can’t just use it, it’s rubbish.
There’s this idea that we should be able to sit down before any computer program and just use it, without any need for study or learning. Most computer programmers hate this; they say things like, “There’s no other domain (because programmers love to use words like ‘domain’) where people can expect to do stuff without knowing what they’re doing.”
Well, maybe gambling in the casino.
The problem is, sometimes we do things the wrong way and it costs us a lot of time. Sometimes there’s a feature that we could use, that we should use, and that we don’t use, because we’ve found a way that “works” even though it doesn’t really work.
This is why when you change a font on a Word document, it messes everything up, because you’ve used spaces and tabs for formatting (it just works, right) and now it doesn’t just work because your manual page break is now two lines off and by the time you fix that your picture has moved to the wrong page and now paragraph 3 is split in half.
So now when you write a Word document, you have to ask the question, “How big is my document?” because if you’re writing anything substantial, it’s probably worth knowing how to format things the way you’re supposed to.
I personally never format my Word documents correctly. At work, there are all these fancy templates with predefined styles and layouts. But I always end up just tab-tab-tabbing and saying “This text is HappyMoron justified because I like it thank you very much.”
(I’m not even using a word processor to write this post; I’m writing this blog post in a fancy web-based editing component. This means that I don’t need to know a darn thing about text layout. Just that ‘i’ comes before ‘e’, except after ‘c’.)
So the point is, if you write a user manual for your software, people won’t read it, because we believe (we really do, it’s insane) that we shouldn’t have to. Having a user manual written makes the programmer feel happy, but that’s about all it does.
Does God have a user manual?
This is why I just use LaTeX and let the computer take care of formatting for me
I’ve always admired LaTeX from a distance; I’ve never bitten the bullet to learn it, though.
Really, it illustrates the point perfectly. There’s a right way that we ignore right up to the point that the pain of kludgery becomes more than we can possibly bear.
It’s a happy man who learns the right way early.
It’s really neat about God and his manual (aka the Writings, aka the Scripture)–we’ve got more than just the written manual. He sits right down beside us and helps us figger out what he meant when it was written down–our own personal trainer–the Holy Spirit!!
As any student can tell you, an instructor is a step above a textbook.
But I think the same reluctance to learn often applies – in particular, the reluctance to learn deeply.
I only learn when I need to, and then… Am I more interested in learning God’s true nature, or learning only about his behaviour as it pertains to me?