Re: Great SWT Program

On Dec 6, 9:29 am, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
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.

[vicious insults and lies deleted]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

And stop trying to rewrite history and/or put words in my mouth
***.

[insult deleted] A physical
input device with many input options can easily be made to be less
convenient to use than a different physical input device with fewer
input options. One trivial example would be a 100-key keyboard where
each key requires 20kg of force to push down vs an 80-key keyboard of
the more normal variety.

The number of keys and the force needed are orthogonal, so having more
keys isn't inherently worse.

Anyway, the original scope of discussion was *software* allowing more
input options. Software doesn't require, in and of itself, any amount
of physical force to operate. It is simply not true, and indeed CANNOT
BE true, that adding, say, mouse support will automatically and
unavoidably make software suck. End of story!

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?

Right, so when desigining an input device, the skill of the designer
is an irrelevance in Twisted-world?

No. That isn't what I'd said at all. You forgot to read on to my
simplified example in which designer skill doesn't enter into it. It's
irrelevant, in case you're wondering, because if a UI is bad because
the designer had bad skill, then it is bad because the designer had
bad skill rather than because it had however-many input options!
Sheesh!

[insult deleted; implied I'm cheating]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

I am not moving the goal posts. Except maybe to move them BACK to
where they were before YOU moved them.

Let me use simple words and shout as loudly as possible to maximize
the probability that they a) enter your brain and b) once there
actually get understood. Imagine I've cupped my hands around my mouth
and put this makeshift megaphone right up against one of your ears and
am yelling each word clearly and distinctly at the top of my goddamn
lungs:

IN. THE. ORIGINAL. DISCUSSION. THE. ISSUE. RAISED. WAS. WHETHER. MORE.
INPUT. OPTIONS. COULD. BE. INTRINSICALLY. WORSE.

NOTE. THE. WORD. INTRINSICALLY!

SPECIFIC. AND. CONTRIVED. EXAMPLES. OF. BAD. INTERFACES. MEAN.
NOTHING.

INTRINSICALLY. WORSE. WOULD. MEAN. THAT. FOR. SOME. APP. THE. BEST.
POSSIBLE. DESIGN. WITH. ONE. SET. OF. INPUT. OPTIONS. WAS. WORSE.
THAN. THE. BEST. POSSIBLE. DESIGN. FOR. THE. OTHER. SET!

THAT. WILL. BE, FOR. A. SET. AND. A. STRICT. SUBSET, THE. LATTER.

NOW. IS. IT. CLEAR. ENOUGH. FOR. YOU. TO. UNDERSTAND?!

Christ, I hope so, because I don't know how to make it more armor-
piercing than that. If your skull is too think for even that to
penetrate, then I will have to simply give up on you completely as
hopelessly dense.

You're the one who suggested that the input device would need to be
remapped by software. Are you now suggesting that this software should
write itself?

No, I'm suggesting we assume that the programmer is perfect. After
all, the comparison is between keyboard+mouse and keyboard-only, so we
should change only the one variable. Everything else should be assumed
to be ideal.

[Bent repudiating earlier claims he'd made, calling me a liar, etc.]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

My claim is that it is possible for a GUI app to be worse than a
text-mode app.

That's a trivial claim and a pointless one, and it's one that I never
disputed.

[calls me a liar for the umpteenth time ... and then does it AGAIN.
AND AGAIN.]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

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.

Why would this force me to look at the keyboard before I start typing?

TO POSITION YOUR HANDS INITIALLY, YOU DOLT! Or do you have a Braille-
marked keyboard or some such, and the ability to interpret Braille by
touch? That would confirm my suspicion that you're blind, and
apparently when using the internet trying, amazingly enough, to
"pass".

[falsely accuses me of insulting myself]

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,

I don't have to estimate it at all since I do it all the time.

Either you're miscounting, or you're not bothering to count and then
underestimating. Take your pick.

When I look at keyboards on your average online shop, I see all sorts
of creative placement of function keys, arrow and other navigation
keys, and even shift keys.

That's because they cater to esoteric needs and international buyers.
When I look at keyboards a) that came with any PC I've ever had or b)
in bricks-and-mortar shops hereabout, they are all arranged
identically. ESC, gap, F1 through F4, gap, F5 through F8, gap, F9
through F12, gap, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause, then the Num
Lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll Lock LEDs; horizontal gap; ~1234567890-=
and backspace, gap, ins home pgup, gap, numlock /*-; tab qwertyuiop{}\
gap del end pgdn gap 789+; capslock asdfghjkl;' and enter, long gap,
456+; shift zxcvbnm,./ and shift, gap, up, gap, 123 and enter; ctrl
window alt space alt window menu ctrl, gap, left down right, gap, 0.
and enter.

Every one of them. There may be slight variations in gap sizes and
exact key sizes and positions. Early ones lacked the window and menu
keys, having a longer space bar and alt keys further apart. Laptop
keyboards have only the QWERTY area and function keys plus a FN key
usually between ESC and F1 for activating the emulated rest of the
keyboard, and sometimes have a pointing device akin to a miniature
joystick protruding from the vicinity of the g, h, b, and n keys.

When moving between Sun, Apple and Windows
type keyboards, the differences are even more pronounced. The only
thing people appear to agree upon is the alphanumerics.

Apple changes ctrl and alt to command and ctrl, respectively, and
drops the window and menu keys, last I checked. I don't know what
you're talking about with Sun keyboards, but I've never seen anything
that wasn't either a Mac or a Windows PC keyboard in any stores or on
any machine I've ever used, let alone owned.

You're in some weird European locality, so it's not surprising you see
weirder and more varied keyboards. In North America, in bricks and
mortar environments, in consumer computer products (not mainframes or
anything else oddball like that), they're very uniform aside from the
Mac/PC divide and the full-size/laptop divide, and some variation in
laptop keyboards regarding the pointing device, extra shifting key,
and which keys get you the emulated arrows and etc.; this I attribute
primarily to the forces for standardization and the primacy of the
English language throughout North America.

Well, there is one major exception. There's that weird keyboard that
looks like it was snapped in two near the 1/3 across and then
subjected to high temperatures until it had deformed like a pocket
watch in a Salvador Dali painting. You won't be surprised to hear that
this crazy keyboard is manufactured by Microsoft, and nobody much
seems to actually use it around here.

The ergonomic MS one has the alphanumerics in the correct places for
each hand

There are keys near the center of the QWERTY block that I may hit with
either hand depending on what the context is, particularly the
preceding keystroke or two. That wonky MS keyboard would frustrate
this particular bit of efficiency.

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.

Apple and Sun would tend to disagree with you.

Incorrect. Apple has what, a few percent market share? And this Sun
stuff you've seen must be for mainframes or other non-PC hardware, and
therefore even less common than Mac keyboards. Microsoft Windows, and
by extension PC keyboards, are indeed pretty much ubiquitous, and
among PC keyboards, the layout I described above is pretty much
ubiquitous. I didn't claim they were 100% of the total, or that they
were ubiquitous outside of North America, but they comprise 90+% of
home/office desktop computer keyboards in North America based on what
I've seen and used. The only exception I've run into with any
frequency being the fairly similar standard-issue Mac keyboard. The
only computers with keyboards that I've run into with any frequency
not fitting the description "home/office desktop computer" being
laptops, the odd PDA with a hardware keyboard, and, if you consider
them to qualify as computers, Blackberries.

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

Only indirectly

No, directly.

Ah, so it actually says, in plain text, "This is a window in an MDI
application" in your version of Windows?

No. I never claimed this. You are putting words in my mouth again.
Stop it.

Regardless, the state information in question is visible and directly
observable, without having to explicitly invoke some command to get
the UI to provide the information.

Your claim otherwise was either misinformed or an outright lie.

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.

Actually, your claim has been that Windows is entirely intuitive and
requires no training for an untrained person to use.

No, it has not. It has been that it requires no training *beyond a
normal education* to use, which is quite true. That a normal education
includes minimal training on using common GUI systems, but not on
using a command line, is an interesting but irrelevant fact. (It can't
of course include training on text mode usage generally, because there
is far too little uniformity among text-mode apps to exploit in
creating a general-purpose curriculum -- it would have to teach every
text-mode app in existence one after another to be credible, unlike
the case with GUI-use tutoring.)

This whole thing is ridiculous anyway. One of the most important and
basic consequences of GUI near-standardization is that users can learn
just once, in their childhood education, a basic set of interactions
and metaphors that allow them to navigate the help, navigate the UI,
and discover the functionality in ANY conforming computer software,
just about. The major stumbling block to learning a new app in days
gone by (and still, on text-mode unix) is getting the hang of
navigating the UI, getting to the help with the application-specific
information, and navigating the help; standardizing how to do these
things reduces the training required for any single application to
learning the stuff that really has to be application-specific, and
makes this much easier because there are standardized ways to reach,
search, and browse the documentation that, if well-written, contains
this information. And there are continued post-proficiency benefits in
the form of less mental work context-switching when multitasking,
because less things differ among the apps among which you're
switching.

In practise, though, a complete n00b of decent intelligence *could*
probably learn a Windows system. Moving the mouse has obvious effects
on the pointer, and single right clicks tend to produce context menus
containing the left-double-click action these days. That and some
English knowledge suggests clicking Start and then Help and Support to
get more information on how to use the thing, and guess what? There's
a tutorial there, and you can eventually reach a tutorial on GUI
basics and learn double-clicks, drags, and what-have-you.

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

... to a trained user.

To a user that has actually graduated high school, yes. An untrained
user will struggle somewhat. By contrast, an untrained user will
completely founder trying to use the cruftware that you've been
advocating.

Very well then, spoken by [implied insult deleted]
[more insulting twaddle deleted]
[even, curiously, accuses me of *self-disloyalty*?!]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

On the contrary, it is at the very heart of my assertion that the mere
availability of the mouse...

Since I never claimed this anyway

Indeed not; I did and you disputed it, which is how this branch of the
thread got to this point.

[calls me a liar yet again]

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me are at
all true.

[snip irrelevant mutterings about some graphical port of emacs]

Only in Twisted-world is the fact that emacs is a graphical app
irrelevant in a debate about graphical user interfaces.

A particular variant is graphical. But the debate in this particular
branch is over whether mouse support intrinsically sucks, not over
whether emacs sucks, so emacs is irrelevant here. (For those who
haven't been keeping score, mouse support doesn't suck and emacs does
suck.)

None of the nasty things that you have said or implied about GUIs are
at all true.

You're the one denigrating GUIs around here, not I.

It must be painful for you to get so badly hammered

If it ever actually happened I'm sure it would be.

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).

Without software to control with it, the "environment" is of no
interest whatsoever.

To you, perhaps. In which case you may as well just drop this
subthread and move on. Thing is, I'd originally said the mouse
+keyboard environment was the better one (enabling better software UIs
than could be written for the keyboard-only one) and you disputed
that. But why, if the issue is "of no interest whatsoever" to you? May
as well just concede that I was right about which was the better
environment and move on already.

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,

For some specific environments, certainly.

No. All other things being equal, the mouse does not make things
worse.

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.

Then you should stop making up such claims.

I DIDN'T -- YOU DID!!! JEEEZUS! WILL YOU STOP THIS BULL*** AND THESE
DISHONEST TACTICS?!

You say X. I say not-X. You say no, not not-X. I say yes, not-X. You
then say I should stop claiming X. When YOU'd claimed X.

What the *** is WRONG with you? Have you ever had a head CT? I bet
there's a lesion, and that it may already be too late for them to save
you, given how severe the symptoms are and how much they've worsened
in just the last couple of weeks.

(I notice that you're now stooping to falsely implying that I've
broken the law (...)

[falsely accuses me of mental illness]

Yep -- if it's not drugs, it must be insanity, because it surely can't
be the case that maybe I WAS RIGHT AND YOU WERE WRONG, now, can it? :P

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

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.

Since the above are only problems in your own imagined text-mode app

No, they are problems in emacs as described by YOU in various posts in
this thread.

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

?

[falsely accuses me of mental illness]

I simply asked you to clarify because you wrote an incomplete sentence
fragment that doesn't make sense in context and you respond with
vicious insults?

How rude.

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

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

Of course you don't - [calls me a liar]

OK. Now I'm going to start keeping count of how many times you've
claimed (including implied) that I've lied. This is ... *riffles
through some stuff* ... looks like #79.

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

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

[insult deleted]

Your 634th insult in this thread, in case you were curious, and of
course none of the nasty things that you have said or implied about me
are at all true.

Only because sometimes I can't be arsed to repeat a whole argument in
detail.

Which, by your own rules (as quoted above), means that you have lost
the argument.

Bull***. If I say "A is true because of <detailed explanation of why
A is true>" and you say "No, A is false" I can just repeat that A is
true, and since you did not refute my explanation for why A is true in
any kind of detail, it remains standing.

Basically, you're trying to claim here that if you say "A is false", I
give a detailed explanation of why A is true, and you just repeat that
A is false, then A is false, but if I say A is true, I give a detailed
explanation of why A is true, and you just say that A is false, then A
is false.

In other words, you're basically saying that A is false because you
said so.

What a cogent, mature argument THAT is!

Then again, since your mental age is stuck in the neighborhood of six
years old or so, perhaps I shouldn't expect too much maturity from you
or your debating tactics. It would also explain why it seems like, to
you, having completed a basic K-12 education is some exotic and
amazing level of training that no mere mortal can hope to aspire to
achieving, ranking up there with climbing Everest, earning a black
belt in jiu jitsu, and flying to the moon.

[remainder of frankly nonsensical posting deleted]
.