Re: Great SWT Program

On Oct 6, 2:23 pm, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Both assume that you're willing to do a certain amount of learning
before being able to operate them. I think that really is kind of
the bottom line here -- in my pre-Windows experience, I expected
that with every new program I would need to learn a little
about its user interface before being able to do much with it.
This seemed normal. It's not the norm any more, true, but ....

See recent huge post in which I mention your apparently having gotten
used to it. People were, at one time, used to having every little
bacterial infection be a potential killer, too, before the invention
of antibiotics, but I wouldn't want to turn the clock back. "You can
get used to it" isn't much of an endorsement in my eyes.

vi versus emacs may be a worst-case comparison; all the
other interactive programs I can think of share at least some
keybindings with one of those two popular-in-context editors.

Yeah, right, I just *happened* to pick the worst case purely by
chance. :P

Of course, which keybindings something shares with vi, which with
emacs, and which are completely novel will be another fun guessing
game where the prizes you can win include a wide variety of valuable
beeps, error messages, destruction of data, and even a free trip to
the psych ward of your choice. :P

There's also the matter of configuring things by editing text files
rather than pointing and clicking, and -- probably some other
commonalities I'm not thinking of right now. It's really more
a matter of mindset, I think, than of specifics of the interface.

Leading, no doubt, to conversations like: "Why don't you turn those
off if they annoy you?" "You can turn them off? How? Please tell
me!" (to paraphrase something that seems rather familiar today...)

If this is happening, I'm not aware of it. I'm sure some people
in my environment regard me as eccentric

Yep. I'd be willing to bet a fair amount on that one.

My idea is that it's a good thing to broaden the horizons of
people who at least in theory are trying to get an education.

It depends on what they are trying to get an education in. Physics?
Computer programming? Hair-pulling frustration and the joy of slowly
going insane? If the third is one of their preferred subjects of study
then I'd encourage them to try vi or emacs too! ;)

Insisting that my ways of doing things are the best or only ways --
that would be obnoxious and might backfire as well. But I don't
think I'm doing that; rather, I'm saying "here is another way,
here is why I like it, if you want to learn more it helps a
great deal to have a local expert at first, and I'll play that
role if you like." As a rough estimate, I'd say maybe 5% to 10%
of the students I talk to show some interest in learning more,
which I think is not bad.

Hrm. Maybe the psych department needing volunteers and offering free
credits to anyone that drives themselves mad and then checks in with
them? :) OK, enough cute barbs, even if they are serious, it probably
helps a great deal if you are not insisting that your ways are the
best or only ways, the way you sometimes do on usenet. ;) (Didn't this
start out with something like "Charmap sucks! I use vim and love
it"? :))

Again I'll say that I think you underestimate the difficulties
of learning the platform you seem to find most familiar and
comfortable.

At least it is a single platform so that you only have to learn it
once. Every unix app appears to be a whole additional platform of its
own, with all the learning that that entails even if you already know
how to use a bunch of others...

You mentioned Star Trek in
another post, so perhaps you remember the scene from one of the
movies, in which the crew of the Enterprise goes back in time,
and Scotty tries to use a Mac by picking up the mouse and talking
into it? And we've all heard the stories about (l)users using
CD drives as cup holders.

Don't believe everything you read in alt.folklore.urban.

I have some good stories from my own
very early exposure to Windows. Want to hear about the time
I wiped out the whole Windows system directory by clicking on
the wrong icon? and not one that said anything about installing
stuff or formatting drives either.

You're joking. You didn't hit "delete" or drag it to the recycle bin?
And didn't get a confirmation dialog?? Someone must have rigged the
machine, or it was running something really broken, like Windoze 1.0.

Unix of course is susceptible to any clumsy entering of rm /rf *
(particularly in the root directory) and will happily eat itself alive
without warning you or prompting for confirmation first, of course,
but usually Windows is a bit smarter. (Macs let you delete the
"System" folder, last I checked, but hang in self-defense; when you
reboot the machine it's not hosed because the delete never happens. I
guess newer ones will not even hang, but merely complain that the
files in that folder are in use or something. I think modern Windows
behaves analogously and says there are files in use so the directory
cannot be deleted.)

Once you figure out the general paradigm, sure, it's relatively
easy to pick up new applications. But what I'm saying is that
that's true in the old-time-tools world too

I call BS on this claim, once again. Unless there's a "general
paradigm" that explains the keybindings in things like vi and
emacs ... and you can explain it in a paragraph or three ...

(And my opinion is that GUIs
hide that fact under a pretty interface, which I find somehow
worse than tools that make it clear from the outset that they
aren't going to be usable by total novices. But that may well
be sheer prejudice on my part.)

What about tools that actually ARE usable by total novices (if not
with as much power as by experts, at least with more than zero power)?
Shockingly, on the GUI side of the great divide such tools actually
exist!

.

Relevant Pages

  • Fresher
    ... do a project using JACL Script with Java. ... start learning about JACL? ... Platform is Windows. ...
    (comp.lang.tcl)
  • Make the Most of Your New PC
    ... mint Windows Vista computer this holiday ... the Workgroup name is exactly the same for all the computers in the ... that doesn't support USB 2.0) and low-capacity portable hard drives. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.general)
  • Re: Possible Sleeping Virus
    ... Remember that System Restore only tracks SYSTEM files - not yours. ... You should periodically defragment your hard drives as well as check them ... using Windows XP "prettifications". ... You should at least turn on the built in firewall. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers)
  • Re: Can Only Boot with Boot CD in Drive
    ... install are pointing to the wrong drive, because when you installed the 2nd Windows, THAT became the C: ... When I insert the Recovery disk to re-install windows, it always refers to my drives backwards ... ... Place the drive on which you want to install Windows at the Master position on the Primary IDE controller. ... When you say "Place the drive on which you want to install Windows at the Master position on the Primary IDE controller", I'm not really sure I know how to do that. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Can Only Boot with Boot CD in Drive
    ... The boot files remained there when you reinstalled to the wrong drive. ... are pointing to the wrong drive, because when you installed the 2nd Windows, THAT became the C: ... When I insert the Recovery disk to re-install windows, it always refers to my drives backwards ... ... Keep the other driveOUT of the machine until you have Windows installed properly and up and running, these other drives can be brought online after you install Windows. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)