Re: advanced?

[Ryan Prior <rprior@protonmail.com>]

On Saturday, November 26th, 2022 at 9:47 PM, Simon Josefsson via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> wrote:

> I find use of the term 'advanced' wrt Guix confusing and even mildly excluding, even though it is wide-spread. [...] Can I use it even if I'm not an advanced user? What do others think?


I'll offer a perspective as a native English speaker who reads and writes a lot about software.

tl;dr: the word "advanced" can be offputting and give an exclusive vibe, because of the ways it is typically used in idiomatic English prose written about software. But to a small fraction of people it is the opposite, it is welcoming and inclusive.

In software marketing, if a product or solution is described as "advanced," that typically communicates that it considers and caters to demanding use-cases which are beyond what most people face. If you want to reach people who are struggling with distributed system uptime, describing an "advanced clustering solution" could be a good way to connect, for example.

In software documentation and configuration, "advanced" is used as shorthand for "this is safe to ignore." Less-technical users feel reassured that they can skip an "advanced" section entirely, never read it, and not miss anything that would be relevant to them. A technical user seeing "advanced" knows that this might be interesting to them, but maybe not on the first read-through before they are familiar with high level concepts; it's safe to skip for now. Many applications have a section of their settings menu labeled "advanced" - this too is a shorthand for "safe to ignore." Many users will never even glance at the advanced settings of any application they use, and even power users will often wait until they have some experience with an application before diving into advanced settings.

To a small subset of hackers and techies, "advanced" is a welcome-word: it says, this is something pithy that we included for those who dare to demand flexibility and utility. For those users, an "advanced" software product is likely to be more interesting even if it's hard to use, and they dive into "advanced" configurations immediately in case there's interesting insights about software internals and capabilities in there. This is wholesome and commendable behavior, but IMO folks who behave this way should consider that they are a fraction of one percent and their experience of software is in many ways unrelatable to that of their comrades.