Those articles from mid-1990s are great to read; they are both funny and informative. Even as many of the points they make are still valid today, even more valuable is the ability to look at succeesses or failures with 20+ years of hindsight.
I feel the pain of the user in this particular case. But I also understand the frustration of the people who wanted to write their own smaller programs with less restrictions than the well architected but highly constrained VMS architecture. And ignoring such users can topple a better technology. That is why (a technically horrible) DOS spread like wildfire on personal computers, super unreliable Windows (Win 95 had to be rebooted daily) killed a much more robust OS-2, etc.
We can call such users who want capabilities quickly, even if they are not fully reliable "ignorant lemmings" or whatever, but ignoring them when a competitor does not is very risky. My 2c.
A similar argument has also been made about JavaScript. When it comes to market share I guess most users don't care how elegant the solution is under the hood.
I feel the pain of the user in this particular case. But I also understand the frustration of the people who wanted to write their own smaller programs with less restrictions than the well architected but highly constrained VMS architecture. And ignoring such users can topple a better technology. That is why (a technically horrible) DOS spread like wildfire on personal computers, super unreliable Windows (Win 95 had to be rebooted daily) killed a much more robust OS-2, etc.
We can call such users who want capabilities quickly, even if they are not fully reliable "ignorant lemmings" or whatever, but ignoring them when a competitor does not is very risky. My 2c.