Nadav Har'El
Thu, 11 Apr 2002 01:55:11 -0700
On Thu, Apr 11, 2002, Adir Abraham wrote about "Re: [Haifux] Random idea about W2L: "Purely" Evangelistic Demos": > > 4. Doing things with Bash (real scripts). (I can show that, but it seems > > like Nadav is the natural selection). I'm choosing Bask and not zsh > > because bash is the de-facto shell. And tcsh is pretty much useless on the > > command line. > > I wonder how that will help to the *newbies*... ? There are two "schools" of thought about the Unix (and Linux) user interface. One believes that the command-line interface (and shells, xterm, editing rc files, environment variables, and everything that go with that) is an old- fashioned, inferior, difficult, non-friendly user-interface which should go away as soon as graphical applications are written to replace each one of them. The second school (to which I belong) thinks that a command-line interface has explicit advantages to anyone who wants to use the computer as a serious tool - it allows to *easily* automate repetative tasks, combine actions of seperate programs in intuitive ways (once you learn that intuition ;)), allows a "What-you-see-determines-what-you'll-get" instead of the Windows "What-you-get-depends-on-10,000-things-you-don't-see". People of the second school do not believe that using a shell is an "advanced" thing, but rather an idea, a way of thought, that should be taught to newbies right from the very start. Before the "era" of GNOME and KDE, all Unix/Linux books started by teaching basic shell. If newbies could handle it then, they can also handle it now. Let's face it - most of the applications you want to show to newbies (e.g., KDE, koffice, gimp, etc.) are cheap Windows knockoffs. Since most Israelis don't care about Windows' price (they pirate it anyway), the only way to convince them (and I'm talking about people interested in computers, not secrataries who need to type letters) to try Linux is to show them some interesting things it can do and Windows normally doesn't. I'm saying Windows *normally* doesn't, because as Orna already mentioned it's not hard to get LaTeX, zsh, and most other Linux applications to run on Windows too. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Apr 11 2002, 29 Nisan 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |The two rules for success are: 1. Never http://nadav.harel.org.il |tell them everything you know. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]