Re: advanced?

[Ryan Prior]

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.