I think the key (to suck people in) is to make the basic things easy,
perhaps even intuitive (although I'm not fond of using that word for a whole
lot of things), and hard things possible, but perhaps you have to work for
them.
The most frustrating thing for someone who wants to get real, difficult work
done is to have a tool that's designed to make the simple beginner tasks
brain-dead (in order to gain acceptance) but has given little or no thought
to being able to do complex things.
A benefit of emacs is that you can pretty much do *anything* with it, if
you're willing to sit down and beat up on some .el files. I will not
pretend to know how vi{m} is extended, though I'm sure there's something of
similar value.
I do think, at least as far as the vi/emacs debate goes that neither of them
is particularly easy to grasp right "out of the box".
Stuff with menus and talking paperclips clearly has the upper hand as far as
entry-level just-get-me-going-with-this-thing speed goes.
OTOH, the last time I knew what was going on in the world of MSWord (maybe
4-5 years ago now) the hard stuff really was still pretty darn hard. Mail
merge was a useful, powerful, and non-trivial operation. And that's not
unreasonable. Make the basics simple for me, and I'm willing to work for
stuff I think *should* be hard. Just please, please, please make them
*possible*.
Bach is accessible. That doesn't mean that after one or two listenings
you've grasped the entirety of the glorious complexity of a given piece. It
just means that the cost of entry is low. You want to really gain a more
sophisticated appreciation for it, you have to listen long and hard, and
have a lot more background than I do. The fact that there's a lot to be
learned after the first "ooh, that sounds nice", is what keeps people coming
back. Compare the game of Go to Tic-Tac-Toe. The rules are approximately
equally simple. Cost of entry is about the same. One lets you continue to
play for the rest of your life and get more out of it. The other is only
amusing to play against someone who doesn't realize it has been solved.
Once.
Nothing worse than a "universal" remote that doesn't have buttons for some
of the functions that my stuff supports. The best approach I've seen (and
I'm not saying it's ideal), is to have the common, obvious buttons easily
accessible, and the more obscure complicated stuff hidden behind a panel
that I have to open and poke a littler button, perhaps with a shift key or
something. If it's not what I do all the time, I'll pay that price
occasionally, and people who *never* do it, don't even have to know the
panel is there.
If I do complicated stuff *all* the time (and, face it, even in complicated
jobs, most of what we spend 80% of our time doing is pretty basic and
mundane) then I'll get a more specialized tool, or something customizable.
And I accept that there's a startup cost associated with that. It'll make
my life easier in the long run, so I'll gladly pay it.
Enough rant, here's my 2 farthings on the editor thing:
I've paid the startup cost for emacs. I know it well and it does my bidding
graciously. So as long at that tool is available, I'll be using it.
I've seen people with equivalent amounts of experience with vi do magic
that, too. I accept that it's also a great tool. It's just not *my* tool.
thanks for your attention
philipp
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Saylor [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 10:25 AM
> To: Chris Devers
> Cc: David Cantrell; William Goedicke; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] emacs discussion
>
>
> hi
>
> ( 03.07.09 22:20 -0400 ) Chris Devers:
> > I wish I could think of better metaphors for this, because
> intuitively
> > it seems clear to me that there are plenty of examples of
> things that
> > are very complex and yet still not necessarily challenging.
>
> this seems too one dimentional- i think most things have a range of
> complexity. if all you do is email and web, osx can be simple. if you
> want to do something different, maybe something unique, that's more
> challenging.
>
> > Bach maybe?
>
> again, simple to complex [musikalisches opfer].
>
> --
> \js
>
> _______________________________________________
> Boston-pm mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
>
_______________________________________________
Boston-pm mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
