The tyranny of the marginal user reminds me of population ethics' The Repugnant Conclusion.[0] This is the conclusion of utilitarianism, where if you have N people each with 10 happiness, well then, it would be better to have 10N people with 1.1 happiness, or 100N people with 0.111 happiness, until you have infinite people with barely any happiness. Substitute profit for happiness, and you get the tyranny of the marginal user.

Perhaps the resolutions to the Repugnant Conclusion (Section 2, "Eight Ways of Dealing with the Repugnant Conclusion") can also be applied to the tyranny of the marginal user. Though to be honest, I find none of the resolutions wholly compelling.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/ARCHIVES/WIN2009/entries/repugnan...

The final suggestions are good, much better than "why didn't you just". The problem comes when your initial thought is actually a good idea, and your colleague could actually have saved some time. This happens a lot in the interaction between senior and junior engineers. For those situations, it's not great to be asking for an explanation on the spot, because then the explanation is just "I'm an idiot/ignorant of that tool".

What's missing, I think, is a question that is not seeking explanation, but improvement. You are not seeking justification of actions, you are identifying an opportunity. This opens up for both an answer starting with "Aha, you might think that, but actually..." and the question "Huh? What is X? How could it be used here?"

Hence, I like

> Could it be made simpler by using `sshd`?

and

> Did you try `sshd`? This seems like it might be a good fit.

It's unfortunate the parent is the top comment here. There's a common thing that happens when a new idea shows up that doesn't easily fit into existing categories:(most) people give it a cursory look over, and then decide it's just another instance of boring category X.

This is especially common in discussions about humanizing programming. I think it's partly because people are invested in the current way of doing things, having spent so much time developing their particular skills; and partly because our attempts at serious alternatives have largely been failures, so far. That makes it easy to see any new idea in this space and automatically class it as already understood. But there is room between C++ and toy visual languages, and someone may find something good there yet—and this will illuminate things just that much more if nothing else.

Look into the lineage of ideas the Eve team have moved through to get where they are today, and you've got to admire their search process even if you don't like the results.

In any case, it's patently false that Eve's innovation is analogous to the algebra example given in the parent.