Why Programmers Hate UI

time to read 1 min | 194 words

The reason that most programmers hate UI is not that it is hard, or that they don’t have fashion sense. It’s not even that user are stupid. Anyone who had to work on something that would sit in the DMZ knows that developers and programs can be just as stupid (and twice as inventive) as the worst user.

Developers hate UI for the same reason that they avoid multi threading. You don’t get a predictable sequence of events to respond to, and you need to handle a lot of state in parallel. Tools can help you here, but the moment that you need to do complex UI, you’re on your own.

This is especially true in Windows, since the expectations of what you can do are much greater and the amount of complexity you need to handle is huge.

I’m not talking about your basic CRUD app; I’m talking something on the level of many items that need to stay in sync, with both UI logic and business logic that need to occur in the middle.

That is the real pain of doing modern UI work.