upvote

points

by csallen12 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby azhenley8 hours ago|
next
[-]
We used to call this “concept count”. You usually want to minimize the number of core concepts that make up your product. I’ve also heard it as the “nouns and verbs” of a product.
reply
upvoteby argee11 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
I think this philosophy might be oversimplified. Tana has basically two primitives (bullets and supertags) and manages to be devastatingly complex to use to the point you have to watch hours of tutorials to do very simple things. Conversely Google Maps has a lot of “primitives” but the UX is fairly tight for 90% of use cases.
reply
upvoteby unholiness56 minutes ago|
parent|
next
[-]
It applies more to design software, where a user is creating durable things and needs to understand those things themselves. Google Maps is more of an agent: It's responsible for understanding its own complexity and answering your queries.
reply
upvoteby ffsm88 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Doesn't Jira only have one primitive: the ticket. Everything else just augments it. You could say that these augmentations are separate primitives, but then the same would apply to all tools in the other cited examples like Photoshop too
reply
upvoteby whh10 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
next
[-]
Vaguely feels like "Atomic Design" but applied to engineering.
reply
upvoteby rgbrgb9 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
what is Tana?
reply
upvoteby mkl8 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
This I think: https://tana.inc/

Seems like there's quite a bit more to it: https://outliner.tana.inc/learn

reply
upvoteby gzread22 minutes ago|
prev|
next
[-]
When I think about products with too many primitives, I instantly think of Snapchat and Instagram.
reply
upvoteby noufalibrahim5 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
I used a similar metric when judging programming languages. The language can get huge but if it's conceptually small, one can learn it and then leave the rest to compounding due to experience. Conceptually large languages had a barrier for me. The case when I felt this was perl.
reply
upvoteby boris7 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
> Commands in a CLI … I think what makes for good product design is having a very small number of primitives.

Small but not too small. Case in point: shell scripts (POSIX shell, bash) where the scripting part was decided to be modelled as commands thus not introducing another bunch of concepts. We all know what the result is (hot, slow mess).

reply
upvoteby dhamidi3 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
I know it's in vogue to bash Bash but I feel that criticism is unfair.

Shell scripting is a victim of its own success: it is _so easy_ to get started that most users get value out of knowing the first one percent and never bother to actually learn the rest.

There aren't many who have read the Bash manual, or know what zsh can do that Bash cannot, etc.

"Shell scripting is a hot, slow mess" is the same hot slow mess that you get wherever the barrier to entry is extremely low (e.g. early PHP, early JavaScript/frontend development, game development with a game engine where you can just click around in the editor, etc).

reply
upvoteby skydhash2 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
There’s also the fact that shell scripting is for automation of what you may do interactively. It’s not for stuff where you want data structures to manipulate in memory. Trying to use it like python is an exercise in frustration.
reply