Aucbvax.2439
fa.works
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works
Sat Jul 25 16:01:51 1981
Mundane systems
>From Joe.Newcomer@CMU-10A Sat Jul 25 15:58:19 1981
I disagree; I do not advocate making "mundane" systems. Consider
EMACS. The first time I used EMACS, I was able to use EMACS.
Of course, I had to crawl around in the manual a lot to find out
how to do some trivial things, but this is true of learning any
new system. The important thing was that I /didn't/ have to know
TECO, or know what magic FS-flags to set in my EMACS.INIT file,
or even that I /needed/ an EMACS.INIT file, or what modes were,
or how to get them. About two weeks into it, I discovered modes;
a few weeks later I decided that certain behavior was definitely
bogus and wanted to change it. Now comes the fun part. The only
way to find this out is the incredibly cryptic TECO documentation,
which is more-or-less up-to-date some of the time in some places.
TECO itself is not what I call a humane language. For example:
the way I wanted error messages to come out was in the lower
window, not at the top right of the screen (which seemed to
frequently force a complete screen refresh!). Huh? Nothing so
simple as
Error_Message_Line := 22
in fact, I never did figure it out; somebody created an EMACS.INIT
file for me. Of course, now my error messages are instantly erased
because the only alternate is a line which is always blanked out
(why?) and I can't control that (why?). The ^L action is totally
bogus at 1200 baud; it keeps repositioning the cursor line to the
center of the screen. I can't fix this because it is "wired into
the MACRO code of TECO".
Making systems simple to use does NOT require that they be so
simplistic that they cannot be extended. It DOES mean that
they should be simple to learn. Example: we have a menu-driven
graphics drawing program here called SPACS. Pretty simple. But
a secretary with almost no previous training can learn enough in
a half-hour to do reasonable drawings. We also have SUDS. The
documentation on this abomination was so poor I had to write a
manualin order to learn how to use it. I had to find out commands
by reading the Macro-10 code. The system is incredibly complex,
extensible, powerful, etc., but nobody wants to take the time to
learn it unless the paybackis worthwhile, which in most cases it
isn't. I see nothing inherent in SUDS which makes it complex, except
whoever designed it thought the Standford keyboard was the only way
to interface to the computer. So upper-top-left-shift-meta-cokebottle
does something useful, but upper-top-left-CONTROL-meta-cokebottle is
harmful to your drawing! The power and extensibility of SUDS could
still be available without requiring that one learn all of it to draw
six boxes connected by lines. SPACS is not extensible, and this is a
collosal loser.
Never, never, confuse "simple" and "easy to learn" with "weak",
"uninteresting", "mundane" or "boring". Just think that a real,
live, thinking, breathing human being WHO HAS BETTER THINGS TO DO
needs to use the tool TO DO THOSE BETTER THINGS. Requiring three
weeks to learn a graphics editor (the SUDS standard learning time)
is NOT a productive use of someone's time!
joe
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