"Walter Bright" <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:jfj38h$8n8$1...@digitalmars.com... > On 1/22/2012 10:30 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> Hah! I just found the *perfect* article about this and other similar >> matters: > > Hilarious! > > It reminds me of back in 1984 or 85 or so, a Mac evangelist came by the > company I worked for then (Data I/O) to evangelize the Mac. None of us in > the group had ever used or seen a Mac before, so we were GUI virgins. > > One of the first things he did was hand out a sheet of paper with a bunch > of icons on it. He proudly asked us what each of those icons signified. We > got about 10% of them right. He was crestfallen. One I remember looked > like a box of kleenex. We all had rather creative explanations for what > that kleenex box did. > > Turns out that was the icon for "Print". > > So we naively asked him, wazza matter with the word "Print" to mean > "Print"? And, you know, if we don't know what the word "Print" means, we > can look it up in a dictionary (or these days, google it). How do you > google a box of kleenex? > > A phonetic language is a fantastic invention. Icons are a step backwards > to ideographic written languages, which require memorization of vast > amounts of trivia (made even worse by companies that copyright their > icons, preventing standardization). > > But what, he says, about foreigners who may not know English? Well, again, > you can look up "Print" in a dictionary. How do you look up kleenex box? > > He finally mumbled something about us just not "getting it" and left. > > To this day, the only thing that makes icons usable is hovering the mouse > over it so you see the tooltip in, ahem, ENGLISH, saying "Print". Heck, as > I write this in Thunderbird email, the icons on the top row all have > English words next to them - Send, Spell, Attach, Security, Save. And the > print icons still look like a box of kleenex to me.
Heh, I like that story a lot. Although I disagree with phonetic being *necessarily* better than ideographic. I do agree with the benefits of phonetic you describe - essentially "easier to learn". But the benefit of ideographic is that they can be quicker and easier to use *after* you've learned them. This is something I've picked up on from learning Japanese (or at least trying to, I never gained fluency...or even came remotely close). Japanese is a very interesting language in this context because it's one of the few languages (actually the only one to my knowledge) that uses both phonetic and ideographic characters. Children and non-native speakers are taught the phonetic alphabets first (hiragana and katakana), because they're easier to learn and can handle any word with a small number of simple symbols. Then learners move on to the ideographic ones (the Chinese kanji). I only ever learned a few kanji, but you notice pretty quickly that once you've learned a kanji you can read it much more quickly than the phonetic equivalent. (It also helps your brain divide a sentence into words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces, but that's not really relevent here). I think a big part of the reason kanji is easier to read (once you've learned it) is that your eyes don't have to move nearly as much, and there's much more visual distinction between words (since there's so many more basic patterns). The fact that they originate from images is irrelevant since they don't really retain much of the resemblance they once did (a few of them do, like "mountain" or "gate", but only if you already know how to "see" it - like being told the "box of kleenex" is a printer). It really is exactly the same as reading "42" instead of "fourty-two". Or the standard VCR-control icons instead of "fast-forward", "next chapter", etc. Totally obscure if you don't already know them, but much quicker and easier to read then the english words if you do. As far as ability to look things up: Other ideographic languages may be different than this (and this certainly doesn't apply to computer icons either), but most of the Japanese kanji (ie, Chinese characters) are constructed from a smaller number of common building blocks, the "radicals" (around 100ish-or-so, IIRC?). As such, there actually is such thing as kanji dictionaries where you can look up an unknown symbol. (I almost bought one once...) Getting back to software, I like the words when I'm learning a program (whether they're tooltips or labels) since the icons are initially meaningless. But once I learn what the icon means, I often prefer to not have the words because, compared to the icons, they're just indistinct visual clutter (and they take up that much more screen real estate). The color in icons also adds yet another dimension for your eyes to lock onto which text labels just don't offer, at least not as naturally. Another thing to note: While the connection between an icon and it's meaning may not (ever) be close enough to initially teach you what it does, the metaphor (even for non-physical things) is usually close enough, or logical enough in its own way, to help you *remember* what it does after you've initially learned it.
