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russK
l33t
Joined: 27 Jun 2006
Posts: 665
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 Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2018 8:23 am Post subject: |
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This discussion reminds me of the TV show on American PBS, "The Woodwright's Shop". The man has amazing woodworking skills and knowledge of hand tools and techniques. These are the types of things you need to know when the power goes out, and and you need to build some furniture.
But the other day, I was making a new wooden gate for my old fence, and I had a powerful hand-held screwdriver and some nifty deck screws. There was no way I was going to use my hammer and nails to put that thing together.
Cheers |
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khayyam
Watchman
Joined: 07 Jun 2012
Posts: 6227
Location: Room 101
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| Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2018 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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| russK wrote: | | This discussion reminds me of the TV show on American PBS, "The Woodwright's Shop". The man has amazing woodworking skills and knowledge of hand tools and techniques. These are the types of things you need to know when the power goes out, and and you need to build some furniture. But the other day, I was making a new wooden gate for my old fence, and I had a powerful hand-held screwdriver and some nifty deck screws. There was no way I was going to use my hammer and nails to put that thing together. |
russK ... a comparible analogist would have bought a fixey thing from Ikea, then, holding the screwy thing, hammered the holdy thing against the pointy things and the fixey thing until the fixey thing fixed the brokey thing :)
best ... khay |
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szatox
Advocate
Joined: 27 Aug 2013
Posts: 3137
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| Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2018 10:53 pm Post subject: |
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| pun_guin wrote: | | Of course the hardware at a given point of time has a major impact on the software written for it. Unix commands (Linux commands not so much) usually have two or three characters instead of four or more ("cp", "mv", "cat", ... "vi") because typing on teletypes hurt the fingers and the developers wanted to soften that. With better hardware there is not much reason to stick to solutions for problems which have become outdated. |
No, it's still faster to type cp or mv than copy or move, and since those commands are basically abbreviations of human-readable words, they are not very hard to memorize.
They become a habit in no time, which I can't say about e.g. lvm's options, where short flags have little in common with their functions, so it's faster to type --size than go to the manual and search for --size to find out the short form. And then, was it upper or lower case?
Obviously, text terminal has a steep learning curve. However, once you know what you're doing, you don't want "tutorial" mode to keep getting in your way.
Think 'bout all those layers of menus in gui.
Click, click, click... Where the hell is that checkbox.... Why can't we have Ctrl+F on the interface functions? I know it exists, I just toggled it like 2 minutes ago...
Anyway, there is a difference between an easy-to-use interface and convenient-to-use interface.
Easy to use e.g. must tell you that your coffee is served hot. In pictures, voice, and a piece of duct tape, because one can't assume that the user can read or have some common sense. |
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Ant P.
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Joined: 18 Apr 2009
Posts: 6920
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| Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2018 2:43 am Post subject: |
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| szatox wrote: | | Click, click, click... Where the hell is that checkbox.... Why can't we have Ctrl+F on the interface functions? I know it exists, I just toggled it like 2 minutes ago... |
Bad example. Ubuntu has that Ctrl+F for anything using the DBus menu API, OS X has it as standard. |
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greyspoke
Apprentice
Joined: 08 Jan 2010
Posts: 171
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| Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2018 8:46 am Post subject: |
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| russK wrote: | This discussion reminds me of the TV show on American PBS, "The Woodwright's Shop". The man has amazing woodworking skills and knowledge of hand tools and techniques. These are the types of things you need to know when the power goes out, and and you need to build some furniture.
But the other day, I was making a new wooden gate for my old fence, and I had a powerful hand-held screwdriver and some nifty deck screws. There was no way I was going to use my hammer and nails to put that thing together.
Cheers |
And reading that, and the rest of this thread, reminds me of the saying "to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
And of course, folk are likely to design things that are do-able with the tools they know and like to use. |
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Naib
Watchman
Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6051
Location: Removed by Neddy
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| Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2018 11:04 am Post subject: |
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| szatox wrote: | | pun_guin wrote: | | Of course the hardware at a given point of time has a major impact on the software written for it. Unix commands (Linux commands not so much) usually have two or three characters instead of four or more ("cp", "mv", "cat", ... "vi") because typing on teletypes hurt the fingers and the developers wanted to soften that. With better hardware there is not much reason to stick to solutions for problems which have become outdated. |
No, it's still faster to type cp or mv than copy or move, and since those commands are basically abbreviations of human-readable words, they are not very hard to memorize.
They become a habit in no time, which I can't say about e.g. lvm's options, where short flags have little in common with their functions, so it's faster to type --size than go to the manual and search for --size to find out the short form. And then, was it upper or lower case?
Obviously, text terminal has a steep learning curve. However, once you know what you're doing, you don't want "tutorial" mode to keep getting in your way.
Think 'bout all those layers of menus in gui.
Click, click, click... Where the hell is that checkbox.... Why can't we have Ctrl+F on the interface functions? I know it exists, I just toggled it like 2 minutes ago...
Anyway, there is a difference between an easy-to-use interface and convenient-to-use interface.
Easy to use e.g. must tell you that your coffee is served hot. In pictures, voice, and a piece of duct tape, because one can't assume that the user can read or have some common sense. |
thing is the easier you.make something the less flexible it is. The more flexible is it the options become more and more complex.
I have a toolsuite I designed and manage at work (written in python and C) and I am well over 20,000 SLOC in just the generic tool and the majority of that is dealing with annoying users.
Except for the convienience of the generic tool I prefer knocking somethibg bespoke in python todo a specific task and as things mature these sometimes become bespoke user tools but the SLOC explode dealing with pesky users and what they want out of convienience " oh I would like to type an int or a hex and the tool automatically uses either, no I don't want an annoying 0x prefix that you recommend"
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steveL
Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery
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| Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2018 2:55 pm Post subject: |
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| pun_guin wrote: | I use ed every week because I fail to understand why I would have to fire up a full-screen editor for basically performing a simple replace command. However, in that article Bill Joy was quoted like this:
| Quote: | | People don’t know that vi was written for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. |
And that is the major problem with most discussions like this: "Nerds", "professionals" and other "experts" continuously recommending things which are like that because of the limited hardware of their time, not because they were technically superior than modern alternatives. |
Wow, I've never seen someone contradict oneself, so immediately in the same post.
Bill Joy's quote is clearly nonsense, as your own post demonstrates.
QED.
And no, I don't see any value in forcing people to type "copy" and "move" instead of "cp" and "mv"; if you don't know the terminal yet, go and lurk in #bash on IRC: chat.freenode.org or .net for a few months: you will learn an awful lot more.
In fact, we do recommend these alternatives as superior: for when you just need to get something done, and for when you need to script.
It is just the component-based approach, which in the Microshite and Crapple world supports an entire "economy".
To find out more, buy UPE and Software Tools.
If you cba to read at least one, please stop with the ill-informed nonsense, already.
The "major problem" is in fact the layers of bullshytt that all the marketeers and spivs who want to sell you what is already ours, keep spewing out into the public domain in order to take money for nothing, principally by obfuscating the simple (which is not the same as "easy".)
The fact that these programs ran well on limited systems, means they run even quicker nowadays. That's why they are so useful as components. And they go on being useful decades after first implementation.
We cannot say the same about other software, certainly of the "more convenient" sort, that just ends up with idiot-boxen that no-one really wants to use in the longer-term. |
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tld
Veteran
Joined: 09 Dec 2003
Posts: 1816
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| Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2018 4:01 pm Post subject: |
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| steveL wrote: | | And no, I don't see any value in forcing people to type "copy" and "move" instead of "cp" and "mv"; |
If only that were all we were up against right? Nowadays we're expected to replace [cat|grep|sed|whatever] /var/log/messages and the like with some convoluted journalctl horse shit because, you know, the concept of building things our of smaller well designed parts...the shit that's kept unix going longer than most computer users have been alive...unlike everything else in science somehow "wear out" over time and need to be replaced like an old tire.
Tom |
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