More and more of our life -- work life, social life, civic life, love life, family life -- plays out on software platforms, and I'm not revealing myself to be some kind far-seeing futurist when I say that there doesn't appear to be any real chance of the trend slowing. Yes, software is eating the world, but even if it isn't licking its fingers and burping just yet, it does have an outsized influence on the way we live our lives. As such, it seems like a good idea to think about why people like some software, and dislike other kinds.

As good a place to start as any (and I think better than most) is to look at what software people actually, publicly, profess their affection for. Maybe it's just the circles I run in, but if I were to write down the top 3 programs I hear people most enthusiastically hail, it would look something like this:

-> Emacs, Vim, Sublimetext

-> programming languages and compilers of all sorts

-> Adobe Photoshop

-> Microsoft Excel

Coincidentally, I would say that the top 3 list of programs that I hear the most vitriol and complaint about would look something like this:

-> Emacs, Vim, Sublimetext

-> programming languages and compilers of all sorts

-> Adobe Photoshop

-> Microsoft Excel

So whatever it is that makes people really passionate about a piece of software is the same thing that makes people really hate it. All of these applications are ones that require a pretty steep leaning curve. Once you've done the work though, they seem to really amplify the amount that you can get done, in a Jobsian "bicycle for your mind" sense.

These applications will never be mass-market consumer applications like Google Search or Facebook, but they're there in the background, quietly allowing the people who make all that world-changing software to keep making it faster. IT is just the industry I'm most familiar with, but I'm sure there are other tools (software and otherwise) that fit this same niche in other industries.

I wonder what those are.