Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1194626901.593225.3950@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bbound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 7, 6:48 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Perhaps. And perhaps I prefer it to having to deal with an interface
that seems designed for a mass market I don't really consider myself
part of. <shrug>

Oh? Well *that* explains a few things.

So, what kind of market do they have on your home planet, and how is
it different from Earth's?

I guess it's true that in some sense people who don't consider
themselves part of the mass market live on another planet.
It's a nice place in some ways -- advertisements have little power
[1] to influence our buying decisions, the sources of news and
information are generally of higher quality [2], and so forth.

[1] Not zero power, I suspect. As I understand it, even people
who don't believe a word of an ad are still influenced, in a
"slightly more likely to remember the product name" way.

[2] Compare any print medium, or NPR in the US, with US television
news. I guess things could be different in whatever country
you live in.

A GUI without such behaviors is quite possible.

"Possible" and "common" not, of course, being the same thing.

"Possible" being sufficient to disprove any claim of an intrinsic
failing of the GUI user-interface paradigm.

Strawman argument. No one has made any such claim, as far as
I can remember. More than one person has said that most of the
GUIs we've used have some shortcomings we find annoying enough
to make us prefer other tools, but that's not a claim about
what GUIs are capable of, only about the behavior of the ones
we're familiar with. One person (Bent?) has even said that
he can imagine GUIs adding features that would overcome these
perceived shortcomings. Why this isn't happening -- I can only
surmise that there's no demand for the features we find useful.

I would further surmise that the lack of demand has something to
do with the fact that most people have not been exposed to any
UI paradigm other than the dominant one, so they don't really
imagine anything outside its boundaries. This is one reason
I think it's important for the people who may be designing the
software of the future to be exposed to more than one form of UI.

Sounds like a lot of trouble, if all you want to do is a few quick
edits, and being able to do the quick edits requires access to a lot
of files local to the remote system. <shrug>

Not really: mount the appropriate share; fire up editor; type away.

And that probably works fine if the remote files aren't too big,
and your network connection is fast enough -- I mean, if you're
going to open one of those remote files, isn't that going to
involve shipping all of its bits temporarily to the local system?
at least to its memory?

It might not matter much if the network connection is really fast,
and many people probably do have fast connections at their jobs.
Whether they have that at home as well .... I'm skeptical, though
I guess it's possible.

My mileage varies. Schlepping large numbers of files back and forth,
or trying to keep a remote system in synch with a local system --
yeah, whatever.

Oh, has the civilization of your homeworld not invented network shares
then? So it's still sneakernet and UUCP or something like those...

In Unixworld we call them "NFS mounts" (if I understand properly
what a Windows "network share" is). How common is it for Windows
shops to allow remote access (i.e., off-site) access to these
shares?

Even if the schlepping is hidden / automatic / easy, it's still
happening, isn't it? which to me seems kind of inefficient, though
I suppose if the network connection is fast enough it might not
matter much.

[ snip ]

Do they all share the same conventions? No.

Do any TWO of them? The two primary text editors appear to be
completely and wildly different in every conceivable respect. Even
their clunky workarounds for ancient terminal hardware lacking arrow
keys are completely distinct. I expect the various mailers to be
equally diverse, and the newsreaders, and the paint apps, and the
spreadsheets, and the word processors ... except for the modern GUI
stuff for KDE and Gnome, of course.

Your expectation is -- wrong? no, no, can't say that -- not
fulfilled? Yes, as I say a few sentences later, most other
text-mode applications I know of make some use of either the
vi keybindings or the emacs keybindings. Some (e.g., the bash
command shell) allow you to choose either one.

As for the two editors using different keybindings -- well,
few people use both on a regular basis.

And really, this whole thing about keybindings -- I don't know,
but it seems like a bit of a red herring to me. It's nice if
the same keybindings work in multiple applications, and a bit
annoying when they don't, but I guess I'm not convinced that it's
as important as you seem to think.

But to the best of my knowledge most of them adhere to one of a small
number of conventions

"Small" in roughly the same way that VY Canis Majoris is "small"?

("small number" here being -- well, two that I can
think of, vi-style and emacs-style).

Exactly the same as the number of text editors -- what a
coincidence! :)

Why, yes.

Eh. So much for using it to actually delete whole paragraphs or
similarly, then.

Right. I wouldn't use 'x' for that.

So, to delete whole paragraphs, you wouldn't use delete.

To delete whole paragraphs, I wouldn't use "delete character", no.

No, no, I won't ask. It will just beget another round of this, with
you explaining in a perfectly reasonable sounding tone as if it were
the most natural thing in the world

As someone pointed out a few rounds ago, nothing about how we
communicate with computers is natural. Maybe if you've only
spent significant time with one platform, and you started with
it at an early age, "control-Z to undo" is as natural as breathing.
Just like for me "j to move the cursor down a line" .... :-)?

that there are sixty thousand
delete keys each with its own specialized purpose, some for deleting
paragraphs, others for deleting email addresses, others for killfiling
usenet posters ... and none of them the key labeled "Del" on a
standard 101-key keyboard.

Curiously enough, vim in insert mode responds to the Del key by
deleting the key under the cursor. I don't use that feature,
because for me learning the older methods long since became a sunk
cost. But it's available.

And then me sputtering and attempting to
point out how this design appears to be an unfortunate byproduct of
some computer business in some ancient civilization having had a
"bring your kids to work day". :)

What are you on about ....

[ snip ]

It affects their Web browsers?! Isn't there a standard interpretation
of a tab in a <pre> block? I'd have thought eight characters.

The point I was making is that if I want them to see code displayed
in the same way I do (indented with fewer than 8 spaces per level),
using tabs probably isn't the right way to do it -- which you're
confirming here, aren't you?

:P

Perhaps you should ask them how THEY want to see code displayed.

Yeah, yeah ....

I guess if I thought anyone would be seriously annoyed by my
choice of indentation, I could do left-margin indents with tabs
only, and use spaces for making inline comments line up nicely.
"Whatever".

I'm all in favor of what I understand to be the original idea of
HTML -- logical markup, with details of presentation dependent
on user's settings. I'm just not entirely convinced it makes
sense for code.

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

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