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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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