Re: Great SWT Program

On Dec 3, 7:31 am, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
All I need to do is show that having more input options isn't
/necessarily/ better in all possible cases, which I have done and you
concede so yourself above.

But it is necessarily no worse, which is all I need to show.

[calls me a liar] since it is easy to create a
many-input interface that truly sucks.

Oops. There's insult #602; of course, none of the nasty things that
you have said or implied about me are at all true.

You are once again confusing the environment with the application,
idiot.

The environment having more input options is necessarily no worse.

The application having more input options ... well, it depends on the
application, and I've never disputed that.

Stick to debating the relative merits of an environment with more
input options and an environment with fewer, and drop the straw man
arguments centered on a hypothetical individual badly-written
application AND the false conflation of the two only loosely related
issues of environment input options vs. individual application input
options.

I didn't, and you didn't. What we did was receive an interface to use
to do a job - we would have no access to its programming.

Then you're still babbling incoherently about the hypothetical
situation of a specific application that's badly designed, which is
irrelevant to whether an ENVIRONMENT with more input options that
application writers can choose to use is INHERENTLY worse, which is a
ludicrous claim that you've formerly made and, I suspect, you're now
realizing is unsupportable.

My hypothesis was that they made the best design possible given the
constraints, numbnutz.

Since one of the constraints is the skill of the designer, the design
could still be atrocious.

This is getting FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

FORGET the designer's skill and other irrelevancies. Let's make this
REALLY FUCKING SIMPLE for your REALLY FUCKING STUPID EXCUSE FOR A
BRAIN shall we?

Behind Door #1, we have the best possible design using keyboard and
mouse. Best possible design. Period.
Behind Door #2, the best possible design using keyboard alone.

It is not possible for the design behind door #1 to be strictly worse
than the design behind door #2, and therefore the keyboard+mouse
environment is not worse than the keyboard-only environment.

It is possible for design #1 to be strictly better, and therefore the
keyboard+mouse environment is strictly superior to the keyboard-only
environment.

Is it sinking in now, moron?

You seem to have [insult deleted]

603, and none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about
me are at all true.

Irrelevant. Programmers bad at such a thing should program something
else, like the backend engine or something. Or let a widget library
like Swing take care of the detailed handling of the input mechanics,
if possible.

Perhaps they should, but that has nothing to do with your claim.

None of this digression of yours about programmer skill has anything
to do with my claim.

Straw man alert! No GUI app I've used wants mouse inputs this specific
and clunky. There are left and right clicks, double-clicks, and drags,
and that's about it. Hovering can produce extra information but is not
needed to do anything really important as a rule.

What we are discussing is what is /possible/, not what has already
been done. Surely, you are capable of debating hypothetical
situations?

Yes, but your behavior is ludicrous. You claim that GUIs can never be
better than text-mode because it's possible for someone apparently
bent on active sabotage to make a horrible GUI. That's stupid. ***,
just "see above". I've shot your latest bull*** down in flames up
there and proven my original assertion beyond a reasonable doubt.
Please just concede this point now and MOVE ON ALREADY.

You implied that you suspected that I did, a while back.

What I /have/ said is that you actually /admitted/ to looking at your
keyboard while typing, although not constantly. The impression you
gave was that you do so occassionally, but this remains unclear.

Generally when I start to type after having used the mouse or actually
left the area of the computer, and generally not at any other time. In
other words, at exactly the same times you would have to, save that
you never actually use a mouse so in practise it will only happen for
you when returning to the computer from having done things completely
elsewhere.

I'm fairly sure I haven't looked at it once while writing this post,
except to orient myself right at the start of writing it. You'd have
to do the same, even if you didn't even move your hands after first
orienting yourself and positioning them. Unless maybe you've got
Braille keycaps or something. I sometimes wonder, based on your
oddball software preferences and emphasis on text-searching over
visual means of navigating and selecting, whether you are in fact
physically blind; it would explain a great deal, albeit make your
claims of how everyone, even the sighted, that uses text editors
should adopt your tools even sillier. I suppose we should all adopt
screen-reader software too, even when we read far faster than we can
listen to some mechanized voice babbling?

I can also see dislike of the GUI "clutter" I call "providing context
so the user isn't stuck with tunnel vision" as well as dislike of the
mouse arising from actual blindness: screen readers listing an endless
load of button captions and text labels far from the bit of the
current dialog box that you're actually interested in would get
annoying fast and lead to very slow interaction compared to a UI that
only furnished specific information upon request.

This shows that "tunnel vision" tools do have at least one legitimate
niche market where they will be better than equivalent GUI software.
But they are certainly not for everybody and I will continue to
dispute you whenever you publicly suggest otherwise.

My evidence is [insult deleted]

That's an insult (#604), not evidence.

[insult deleted]

605, and none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about
me are at all true.

Plus, you continue to grossly underestimate the number of characters
you'd have to type in general to navigate with search, probably
because you continue to assume incorrectly that all n-letter prefixes
will be uniformly distributed and occur at equal rates in the text to
be searched.

Chances are that if a considerably more efficient one exists, it would
have been invented during the typing pool era.

A considerably more efficient one that works with modern computer
keyboards but doesn't work with mechanical keyboards that a) jam if
used too speedily, b) require more mechanical force to hit each key,
and c) have half the keys of a modern one may very well not have.

A system that incorporates them all is, however, going to run into the
tricky problem that not all keyboards have the same layout for all of
these extra keys. The alphanumerics are entirely standardized (making
QWERTY style touch work), and the shift keys are reasonably close to
standard. As for the rest, however, you'd basically have to specialize
on one keyboard type.

Well, keyboards in North America seem to be heavily standardized.
Almost 100% of them have exactly the same layout down to the
millimetre. There's the odd exotic one, like the weird curving,
fractured-QWERTY-area MS one (which violates your claim that the
alphanumerics are "entirely standardized" if you consider a single
exotic exception to render the whole idea useless), and there're some
hints that Europe's a mess as regards standardization. I don't even
want to contemplate what they use to type in Korea, Japan, or China,
whose "alphabets" (symbol-sets, in their cases of ideograms) are
vastly larger than the 36 alphanumeric characters on a bog-standard
QWERTY keyboard, or even the 50-odd printable characters, including
punctuation, on same.

But for a North American, there's one keyboard layout that is so close
to ubiquitous that it can more-or-less safely be depended on.

Not that I'm claiming to have discovered an especially efficient
method of typing; just one that's reasonably efficient, and probably
no less so than yours, even if it is not identical to yours.

I suggest to everyone that they look up posts from Twisted wherein he
writes "... everyone else ...", ponder a bit over whether or not he
actually /does/ refer to the entire human race in his statement, and
finally reflect over whether or not this means that he is calling
himself an "arrogant sumbitch" in the above paragraph.

No, I am calling myself "average", and simply relaying observations,
about how other people type and use computers.

That paragraph was to everyone else, not to you.

It was, however, intended to cause everyone else to draw false and
damaging conclusions about me, so I have to respond to set the record
straight, as I did.

[a variety of babble snipped]

There's a double row of maximize, minimize, close buttons. The state
is still visible.

Only indirectly

No, directly.

and only to trained users.

We both assume trained users -- though you tend to assume ones with
weeks (or more) of intensive training, and I only assume the basic
proficiency in bog-standard GUI usage that someone entering high
school should already have as part of their K-12 education.

This is why you never really know what you'll get
when you're using Word, because older versions will have MDI and newer
will not.

There are exactly two alternatives and they are easy to visually
distinguish.

I continue to wonder if you are, in fact, blind, or making a cack-
handed attempt to advocate for the blind or something; I can see how
blind users might have trouble telling these two apart, or more
generally knowing when to use ctrl-tab.

This does not, however, mean that everyone, however good their vision,
should drop normal-UI tools and adopt your strange brand of cruft. :P

Spoken by the person who cannot even open a new tab to browse
newsgroups in while writing a news posting in the original one . . .

I can. I won't, however, because of the unknown risk invoked by having
two concurrent google groups logins to the same account.

The shortcut not existing is your straw man. Nothing about the mere
existence of the mouse compels a programmer not to include a keyboard
shortcut for anything in particular, after all.

Probably not, but that is neither here nor there.

On the contrary, it is at the very heart of my assertion that the mere
availability of the mouse as an input device does not automatically
ensure a terrible UI.

You cannot use specific examples of badly-designed software to tar all
GUIs as inherently unusable, any more than you can use the examples of
MS-DOS Edit and the Borland IDE to support a claim that text-based UIs
can never go wrong. :P

No, over your argument that adding mouse support and graphics to a
user interface automatically dooms it to awkwardness.

I never claimed this

Yes, you did. You have since tried to retroactively change your claim
to merely that "it's possible to write a bad GUI app", which is
trivial since it's possible to make an atrocious UI of any type if you
really set your mind to it.

Stop trying to rewrite history and accept that you've lost.

[snip irrelevant mutterings about some graphical port of emacs]

So you *are* repudiating your earlier claims that adding a mouse and
GUI always makes things worse,

I never claimed this. [calls me a liar]

606, see above, and none of the nasty things that you have said or
implied about me are at all true.

Of course, the problem you are facing is that we are in actual fact
comparing an exceedingly good text-based interface (emacs in my case)
with mediocre GUI-based ones (notepad, word, etc.).

We're doing nothing of the sort. Notepad's is a good GUI. (Word's is,
admittedly, mediocre.) Emacs' text-based interface is positively
atrocious. Your calling it "exceedingly good" doesn't change this fact
any more than your saying some turd smelled like roses would mean it
didn't stink to high heaven.

Note that this issue is orthogonal to feature-set. Notepad's is poorer
than Word's or emacs'. It's a shame about the interfaces of the latter
two.

Bull***. I said that having more input options does not automatically
mean lower productivity, and you disputed me.

No, what you said was that having more input options must at least be
as good as having fewer ones

THAT'S THE SAME THING, IDIOT!

Of course it isn't.

YES IT IS, IDIOT! I went on in the original post to explain exactly
why, too. I *thought* I'd done so in language simple enough for even
someone as dense as you to understand, but apparently I overestimated
your IQ *again*. I think it may be as low as the upper forties, if not
lower, at this point; your atrocious reading comprehension skills and
reasoning abilities are so bad as to indicate that you probably have a
severe disorder for which you may want to seek medical help.

Having fewer input options can be a better thing if their design

DESIGN IS IRRELEVANT. See above. The issue is which ENVIRONMENT is
better: one with a mouse or one without it (both having a stock 101-
key keyboard). Not whether some SPECIFIC APP is better or worse than
another. You claimed that an environment with a mouse is worse than an
environment without it, simply because some jerk CAN make an app to
run in that environment that lacks a keyboard shortcut for one
infrequently-used command or some such rot. I called bull*** on that
claim, and I still do.

is that you consider something else to be
important besides productivity. That something else can't be
aesthetics, since a text-mode interface is uglier than all but the
most garish GUIs (such as Windows XP with its default theme,
unfortunately). My guess is that it is precisely the elitism factor --
you consider a UI superior the fewer people can use it, as long as
*you* can use it.

Or, perhaps it is based on the realisation that it is possible to
completely bollocks up a many-input-option UI design

It's possible to completely bollix up ANY UI design, so this is
totally irrelevant. Indeed, you needn't look any farther than vi or
emacs to see evidence that it's possible to completely bollix up a
keyboard-only design. :P

[implied insult deleted]

607, and none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about
me are at all true.

(I notice that you're now stooping to falsely implying that I've
broken the law ... what's next, a bogus patent infringement lawsuit?
That seems to be the preferred next step in trying to silence critics
nowadays, as noted on Techdirt very recently. :P)

The problem is that modern GUI software isn't actually easier to use
once learned than what e.g. emacs is - it's just easier to learn in
the first place.

Sure it is, because various things behave more consistently than e.g.
undo or backspace(!) in emacs, you don't need to personally keep track
of as much esoteric stuff or count the number of times you've done X
to anticipate how it will interpret keypress Y, you can see the
context of your actions, and so on and so forth.

I shall have to remember this the next time you suggest that it is the
user rather than the software that needs adjustment when the two do
not agree.

This is what YOU keep claiming, particularly when I complain that the
way you've described it implies that the emacs UI actively deceives
the user -- you say the user has to learn to expect emacs' broken and
abnormal behaviors, e.g. learn to know where the insertion point
REALLY is going to be based on what they've previously entered while
ignoring the location of the little blinky thing. :P

And the Windows Explorer, of course. Oh, and Microsoft Word, Excel,
etc.

?

The implication being that you think I lied. Of course, I actually did
nothing of the kind.

The implication being [snip disingenuous "innocent explanation"]

I don't believe that that was your motivation, or what you intended to
imply to our mutual audience.

One more time for the dim-witted: a lack of meaningful argumentation
from you means that you've conceded a point

If only the world played by your rules, eh?

Those aren't *my* rules, they're general rules of debating.

[insanely, Bent continues to dispute this]

You should really shut up now, before you sprain your poor broken
brain by trying to actually think with it or something.

Responding
to cogent arguments with things that amount to "Is not" or "I think
you're lying" with no real reasoning and zero evidence is a sign that
you've lost the argument.

If we were to measure who has written "Liar!" and "Is not" the more of
us two, it is not I who would come out with the highest count.

Only because sometimes I can't be arsed to repeat a whole argument in
detail. So I write a lengthy paragraph proving you wrong, you write
"Is not!", and I write "Is too!" instead of repeating the whole
fucking paragraph. That doesn't magically make me wrong and you right.
That you'd even suggest otherwise does, however, make you an ***.

[snip remainder of Bent's latest torrent of drivel]
.