Aucbvax.1965
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!BENSON@UTAH-20
Sat Jun 27 10:38:28 1981
Tools for personal workstations
One thing we should avoid in designing tools for use by non-programmers is
condescension. Elegance of design, yes, but simple-mindedness, no. There are
three aspects I see to this:
1. It should be possible in a short period of time (perhaps less than a day,
depending on the application) to learn enough about it to be productive.
2. The expert user should be able to make maximal use of the features available
without being hampered by the requirements for (1).
3. A smooth transition from (1) to (2) should be possible.
An excellent example of this is the Tops-20 command language (EXEC). I
assume most of you are familiar with it. By combining command completion
(recognition), abbreviation and menu-on-demand, the needs of expert and
novice are served equally well.
Another example is the Emacs text editor. It is used by nearly everyone
here, including administrators and secretaries. It is possible to learn
enough in an hour to make productive use of it, then acquire facility in
advanced features (editing modes, TAGS, word abbreviations, etc.) to make
it a powerful tool. In addition, since it is programmable (all key
definitions are soft), a wizard can add features for specialized
applications. (Admittedly, no one in their right mind would use TECO as a
programming language; that was a design error not likely to be repeated.)
We don't have to choose between programs that are continually asking
Do you want to pick your nose (Answer YES or NO)?
and the arcana of Unix command names. We can have the best of both worlds.
-- Eric
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