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0 pointsTeMPOraL5y ago0 comments

> so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance

I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time:

(I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.)

As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0].

Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English.

[0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.

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fludlight5y ago

Emacs user for 20+ years here. I have written a nontrivial amount of elisp. I like emacs; and, yet, I still sometimes get confused by the difference between a window, a frame, and a buffer. Sometimes I encounter a phrase like “frame buffer” and just ignore it to avoid going down that rabbit hole again.

DonaldPShimoda5y ago

Ah, I see. That's a fair point! I hadn't considered the difficulty of language choice when it comes to non-US computer users. Thank you for sharing your experience!

But I should clarify that I wasn't even thinking about terminology when I mentioned skeuomorphic design. I meant things like how the "trash" on the desktop looked like a physical trash can, how the "save" button looked like a floppy disk, how the calendar app was meant to look like a physical calendar, etc. The system was designed (visually, I should say) to remind people of their physical offices so they could more easily interact with a computer when they had no prior context for it.

But over time, we have moved away from these physical allusions because people have simply become familiar with computers.