Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1190961037.906718.180670@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<nebulous99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 26, 9:15 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

(Okay, a few more things .... )

That's it exactly -- in this case, what you really want is a command
processor with better interactivity/editing functionality, not an
editor with auto-paste-from-shell functionality. What you're
ultimately doing there is shell stuff, with fancier editing than the
shitty shell-prompt line-editor allows. Which suggests a command
processor with better editing functionality rather than an editor with
command launching and output redirecting functionality. Kludges like
this indicate the need to redesign the system in question from the
ground up.

Just out of curiosity, what do you have in mind when you say "command
processor with better editing functionality"? I'm wondering whether
it's something recent Unix/Linux shells provide, but in an obscure
way, or something I haven't thought of at all.

[ snip ]

If you want an interactive tool, gnuplot. I'm pretty sure just
about everything I know about it was learned without a live tutor.
Now, if I didn't already have some familiarity with similar tools,
I might have had more trouble. But I do, just as Windows users
have familiarity with the conventions of *their* platform.

At least our platform *has* conventions.

So does ours. Several of them. "The nice thing about standards
is that there are so many to choose from"? (Who said that?)

[ snip ]

(For the user-interface. I
know unix has arcane conventions for command line argument syntaxes,
directory structure, and other things, none of which are 100%
intuitive or especially well-documented, but it clearly has none at
all for interactive UI!)

[ snip ]

Mainly those happen on Windows through boneheadedness or bugs in the
software. On Unix they also seem to happen from simply trying to set
up and use something in a non-fancy way, because setting something up
on Windows is pick-install-directory, select-options, click-install,
reboot whereas on Unix it is somewhere in between a) setting up an
entertainment center whose instruction pamphlet is the size of the
Encyclopedia Britannica and written in Swahili plus pictograms that
appear to be lifted from the Ming Dynasty edition of the Kama Sutra
and certainly bear more relation to this than to the components you
have arrayed before you and b) setting up a shiny new CANDU reactor
with the optional fuel reprocessing module and waste storage vault --
some assembly required, moon suit sold separately. (The instruction
manual for one of *those* fills a small library, or so I'm told.)

I replied to this briefly yesterday, but I could say a little more:

Many current Linux distributions seem to be aim to be "friendly"
for people whose previous experience is with Windows. This means
an installation process with menus (point-and-click graphical if
the installer can figure out how to talk to the graphics hardware,
otherwise text menus, I think), GUI tools for doing sysadmin
things, etc.

Installing optional extras from the distribution is often as simple
as a single command, for which there's probably a point-and-click
interface, though I haven't investigated. For example, recently
I installed Wine (Windows emulation of some sort) on one of our
systems, by typing 'yum install "wine*"' and eventually responding
to an "is this okay?" prompt. Everything else was automatic,
and the people I did the installation for haven't complained,
so I guess it worked.

Installing not-from-the-distribution software is sometimes more
complicated, but a surprising number of applications now come
packaged with an installer that operates much like the ones you
seem to be used to from the Windows world.

Even the applications packaged in the old way (archive files
generated by "tar") -- well, my experience has been that un-tarring
the thing and then typing "configure; make; make install" usually
"just works".

I won't say that any of the above *always* works; sometimes things
go wrong in baffling ways. I don't *think* that's the norm,
but it's hard to say. Support for hardware has been a problem
for Linux, since apparently a lot of hardware manufacturers are
unaccountably uninterested in supplying drivers for a minority
o/s, and FOSS types can't always keep up. But that also seems
to be improving, as best I can tell.

I also think that familiarity with the platform makes more of a
difference than people might suspect. Even the simplest stuff in
Windows is apt to flummox me, because I don't know the platform
and its conventions. My first reaction is usually to blame the
platform, but in my more lucid moments I realize that my own
ignorance is also a factor. Recently I spent, oh, I think an
hour all in all just trying to get my laptop to talk to a local
printer and print a PDF file. Some things were remarkably easy,
but at some point I got an error message about no printer being
installed that baffled me -- until finally, after a lot of
frustrating Googling, I discovered that the problem was that
there was no "default printer". <shrug>

[ snip ]

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
.