Aucbvax.2453
fa.works
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works
Mon Jul 27 06:54:21 1981
Collected responses on extensibility and design
>From WorkS-REQUEST@MIT-AI Mon Jul 27 06:49:14 1981
WorkS collected responses on extensibility and design
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Date: 26 Jul 1981 20:36:10 EDT (Sunday)
From: Bernie Cosell <COSELL AT BBN-UNIX>
Subject: mundane systems
I must be missing something. It seems that `mundane' means
something a little different from what I thought... It looks
like there is a confusion between `under designed' and `under
powerful'. I originally thought `mundane' to have been
intended to connote `under designed', but it seems that most
of the comments about it immediately make arguments based on
a connotation of `under powerful'.
For example, in reference to Jan's car-shift image, I wonder
what her choice would be if it were between the grubby automatic
and a multi-hundred gear shifter with hidden catches and missteps
around every corner: miss first gear and the windshield wipers
turn on, fumble a double clutch and your brake fluid all leaks
out (good luck stopping). And.. the way the gearshift has been
designed, it is almost impossible to find a comfortable subsets
of the gears that you can use - even with lots of practice you
still occasionally bollix something simple up and have something
truly perplexing happen. And... the way you get anything fixed
is to be given a tool box and a service manual and be told you
are on your own (you don't like having ten different reverses?
just get in there and change it).
Although I use EMACS and am fairly proficient at making it stand
on its head, I resent the amount of irrelevant expertise I had
to master to be able to move about in that world, and the need
for introspection at every level: far far too many things were
clearly under-human-engineered (they may have been OK for
programmers, but certainly not for people).
[For example, I believe that any sensible design would
have its commands mostly ordered by danger and globality
and one would try very hard to make the very easily typed
commands be only the local, non-dangerous ones and make
it progressively harder to `get at' the more wide ranging,
damaging commands. Having `delete a character' be next-
door to `muck with the whole region' (most of the time
when you hit it by mistake, you probably won't even know
where you last left the mark). In my (painfully crafted)
EMACS environment, the control and meta functions are
mostly only those mostly useful in on the fly correction
of running text (delete a word, twiddle chars, etc.), my
VT100 keypad has the global/dangerous commands that I use
regularly but that I a) want to be sure of not hitting
by mistake, and b) usually appropriately want to pause a
moment to make sure that I mean what I am about to type
(delete region, undelete region, filter region, etc.).
It aint perfect (I am hardly qualified as a human factors
expert), but it is a darn sight less hostile and punishing
to use than `naked' EMACS (and yes, my profile really does
go and un-bind all of those dozens of silly functions
hanging off of those silly keys).]
I would have much preferred that someone with some taste and
perspective had gone and made a whole coherent `environment'
be available and as much as possible hide the other stuff.
Given the choice, I think I would always go for the well
thought out mostly useable tool - even if I can't personally
`fine tune' it -- over the ill-thought-out facility that, due
to its lack of good design, FORCES me to go mucking with it.
/Bernie
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Date: 26 Jul 1981 13:33:42-PDT
From: SomeoneOnUUCP at Berkeley
Although I agree with Newcomer's comments on easily-usable
program, I am not entirely convinced that anything can be done
about it. We can make simple models of editors, formatters, and
automated desks -- and these are likely to be usable for simple
tasks. But the real world tends towards far more complexity
than we would like, and sometimes the only way to deal with it
is to add complexity to our programs. Worse yet, the real world
is really a plurality of worlds. I might be able to write a text
formatter that satisfied my requirements perfectly, but would be
perfectly useless in meeting the graduate school's obscure rules
for dissertations -- rules like where the page numbers have to
go, what pages should be numbered, when to use Roman numbers --
all manner of nonsense. And there's not a thing I can do about
it, because such rules were (apparently) carved in stone 3000
years ago.
This is not to say we shouldn't keep trying, of course.
And one of best things we can do is to DOCUMENT our unstated
assumptions and design goals, as these are often the best guide
to the overall structure of a system. I found it very difficult
to learn Berkeley's 'vi' editor, simply because such a statement
was missing, and they had added so much syntactic sugar as to
hide the basic structure.
[ There was nothing with this message to actually identify the
author. On behalf of everyone, I would like to ask Berkeley
recipients to take the time to identify themselves within the
text of the message when your mail system itself will not do
it for you. A simple way to do this is to "sign" the message
at the end as many ARPA people and a few UUCP users do already.
Without some identification we are prevented from getting any
replies back to you at all. And it becomes very difficult to
discuss anything when we cannot figure out who is saying what.
Thank you. -- RDD <DUFFEY AT MIT-AI> ]
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End of collected responses on extensibility and design
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