Human intuition over backwards convention

Industry convention is often treated as sacred. That is lazy HCI.

Consistency has value. Shared muscle memory has value. Neither is absolute truth. When a convention is fundamentally backwards from human intuition and creates compounding inconvenience, it should be corrected — no matter how established it is.

The inconvenience of migration is temporary. The inconvenience of living with a backwards convention is permanent and compounding.

That line came out of reverse-quote semantics work across shells. It applies just as hard to GUIs: file dialogs that cannot open files and folders in one place, Start-menu keywords that refuse the word people already type, install snippets that paste as invalid YAML, filters that hide the participation mode people actually use.

Cognition is not a style guide

In Why the human brain prefers Procedural and Functional Paradigms, the claim is that thought is abstracted action — prefrontal machinery evolved to plan sequences and functional groupings, not to worship categorical cages. Joe Armstrong’s critique of OO (functions and data locked in the same cage) is a cognitive argument as much as a language one.

Interfaces inherit the same bias. Group tools by what they do together for a goal, not by an org chart of widget categories. Progressive disclosure is procedural planning made visual: show the next honest step, deepen on demand.

Day-1 naming and mental models

Antora’s naming confusion, marketplace install snippets, and “Files” keyword registration for alternative explorers are all the same class of bug: the product refuses the mental model people bring on day one, then blames the user for not learning the priesthood.

HCI Nerdz’s job is to side with the mental model when the priesthood is inverted.

Sibling note

Shell language semantics and CLI flag hygiene belong to OpenShellOrg. Graphical discoverability, dialogs, and product representation belong here.