Phil Taylor writes: | | More's the point, how could I have discovered the existence | of col for myself? The biggest problem with getting things | done in Unix seems to be that you keep hitting these barriers | where you can't figure out the solution and you just have to | go and ask someone who knows.
This is a long-standing problem in the computer field. If you know the name of something you can usually find out about it. This means you can easily answer questions of the form "I sure would like to use the FOO command; I wonder what it does?" But if you're like most people, you never find yourself asking questions like this. Mostly, you have a description of what you'd like to do, in words that make sense to you, but you don't find anything with the same keywords in any docs. So you start asking around, until someone tells you "Oh, you need the FOO command; it does just what you want." You never would have guessed that, but you look it up, and in the middle of the doc you find something that describes what you want (though in very different words from yours). You can see this sort of language problem all the time in our abc discussions. Every musical style uses its own jargon, a mixture of "standard" musical terms (with slightly different meanings in different groups) and idiosyncratic terms that musicians in the next group over won't understand. Figuring out how any particular chunk of software deals with your musical concepts is difficult, because the software's author(s) used different terms than you do. There has been some study of this sort of problem with the advent of computer GUIs. Any study quickly proves that most of the users use only a tiny fraction of the GUI's capabilities. The reason is that they don't know about the other semi-magical things that they could do. They don't suspect that most of the capabilities even exist, and they don't know how to ask or what to ask for. Watching someone else doesn't help much, because you usually can't see what they did with the keyboard or mouse, and you don't see any pattern in what changes on the screen. And most of it isn't documented anywhere. What documentation exists is mostly incomprehensible to users. If anyone comes up with a good solution to this problem, it will be a major advance in documentation. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
