Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1191987593.848004.19430@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bbound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 8, 5:50 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[ snip ]

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...)

Yes, I've had conversations like that with people struggling with
one of the old tools. And?

It means you haven't shown the new tools to be worse in that regard,
just that they aren't always better in that regard. :)

More or less the point I've been trying to make along -- both have
potential problems, both have advantages.

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! ;)

I was thinking mostly of people enrolled in a degree program in
computer science.

Ah, so the latter of my three alternatives then. ;)

Some of the students seem to agree with you.

I think there might be value in exposing everyone
to some computing platform other than the dominant one, but unless
we can find a way to get around the "only 168 hours in a week" limit,
I wouldn't make vi exposure mandatory for everyone.

Sounds like just using vi is the equivalent of about four full-time
jobs. It's even worse than I thought then.

Well, I was thinking that people might want to spend most, or all,
of those 168 hours a week on other things. Not even I would suggest
that they spend them *all* on vim.

It's not a high
priority for most. For people in a CS degree program, though --
I think sending them out into the world knowing only one platform,
the one they came in knowing about, would be wrong.

They should certainly know the theory and basics at minimum. Having
them know Windows and Mac, or Windows and Gnome, or Windows and KDE
might be good too...

Yes. They pretty much get exposure to some Linux "desktop
environment" as a side effect of using Linux at all. But it's not
clear this is much of a paradigm shift. It's like saying they
should learn something about both C++ and Java, which is good,
without adding that they also should learn something about a
functional language as well.

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. ;)

I don't think I've ever done that, and I resent your saying so,
even with a smiley.

Eh? Didn't this whole discussion start when you championed vi over
anything with a GUI?

For myself. Can you find a post in which I said everyone should
prefer text-mode tools to GUIs? I'm not finding anything like that
on a quick review of the record.

You, however, seem to be saying that your way (GUIs) is the only
way. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding. It happens.

[ snip ]

And to paraphrase something you said elsethread -- this may
seem strange to you, but I don't usually say that some piece of
software sucks without trying it, and to the best of my knowledge
I've never used CharMap.

I don't recall you saying that CharMap sucked.

Then why did you say the following?:

(Didn't this
start out with something like "Charmap sucks! I use vim and love
it"? :))

Instead you pooh-poohed
Windows and graphical software in general...

I've said that I think it usually has some limitations that I find
annoying, and I'm willing to give up some novice-friendliness to
have access to tools that don't have the limitations I find annoying.

Unix of course is susceptible to any clumsy entering of rm /rf *
(particularly in the root directory)

Only when running as root; you're meant to be smart enough ....

and absolutely perfect -- incapable of ever so much as making a single
typo or forgetting something?

I'm not sure I can imagine a system that's powerful enough to
let you do anything you might reasonably want to do that won't
also allow you to sometimes make a huge mess -- unless "anything
you might reasonably want to do" is defined to be somewhat more
restrictive than I think most people would like.

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 ...

Well, then how would you explain the fact that I was able to
learn at least one of those old-time tools (gnuplot) without a
live tutor?

Gnuplot might be a lot easier and more natural than either vi or
emacs. I don't actually know much about it, but what you're saying
implies that it must be.

Based on what you've said here, I find it highly unlikely you'd
find it either easy or natural: It's interactive, but with
command-line-style interface, and a built-in help system unlike
either man or info pages. I'm not sure I find it easy or natural
either, just useful, and worth the trouble of learning to use.

By "paradigm" I have in mind something broader than keybindings.
I'm not sure I can define it better than that. Maybe another
time.

Keybindings are where the usability problems are though: until you
know them you can't do anything in tools like those, including browse
the help to find out what the keybindings are in any effective way. I
don't know what would form a paradigm that could aid in that situation
other than "always have a cheat-*** handy".

Yup -- until the keybindings, at least a few of them, including
the one(s) for getting help, become part of one's mental furniture.

Sure. And they certainly have their place. I'm not disputing
that, and I never have. What I've been saying all along is
that there is also a place for tools that require some learning.

I just don't see the point in a tool *gratuitously* requiring some
learning. If you know how to use one text editor you should be able to
use any; one that purposely is not easy to use even if you already
know other software with the same function seems ... inefficient.

Ideally a tool would make it easy for novices to do simple things,
but still provide a lot of power and flexibility for non-novices.
My feeling is that usually one has to trade off one to get
the other. <shrug>

I don't see why.

"Easy for novices" and "complying with my ideas about scriptabilty
and playing nice with the Unix philosophy" aren't mutually
exclusive in principle. In practice, I'm not sure I know of any
tools that are both. As for why that is -- my guess would be
that developers on both sides of the GUI/CLI divide figure they
have finite resources and shouldn't spend them trying to attract
people who are unlikely to like their stuff anyway.

[ snip ]

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