On Thursday 29 May 2003 10:08, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Dan Armak wrote: > >If you look not at the users themselves (ie ignore their existing personal > >habits) but at what they want to with their program, don't you think > > WYSIWYM would fit much better in many cases? > > No, it will not. > > Most technical people, such as this audiance, is used to programming. > Programming is a classic case of WYSIWY mean. The problem with WYSIWYM > is that it requires a certain amount of faith, and a great amount of > mental extrapolation. These are skills that need to be aquired, and not > every mind is suited to perform them as well as other. > > Now you, standing on the cathedral of the one who has already aquired > them, say "but it's so easy! I'm so much more productive this way". To > quote Zaphod's special brain care analist, "That is true, but mostly > unimportant". Most people either don't want to go through the learning > process, or don't have the time and the patience. Bear in mind that not > even all the people who want to program manage to go through the process > of learning it.
You assume that everyone already knows WYSIWYG, msword-style, word processing. But they had to learn that, too, when they first used windows & msoffice. And it must have cost them time and patience. msword is not IMHO so intuitive, despite being WYSIWYG, that people just use it with no prior training. Those who use it as part of their work/occupation surely have either training or just enough experience behind them, or they would not be able to use it as productively as they do. Also, msword's model is a _huge_ waste of resources and time. Just think of all the time spent manually adjusting whitespace and font formatting. That's easily more time per year, for a regular msword user, than the time needed to learn the basics of lyx and get used to it. If we say "everyone knows how to use windows and is used to it except for a few statistically insignificant programmers, and we can't afford to reeducate them" - we're giving up linux on the desktop, and we're giving up hope of removing windows from the desktop (which is more important). And then in ten or fifteen years from now, msoffice will still be widely used. And we'll still be saying that most people don't want or can't afford to learn something else, because they'll have been using it all their lives. Wouldn't it be better if we started converting as many as we can today, so that the next generation will, 15 years from now, use better programs and word processing idioms? Is that impossible? Is it in any way unfair towards those we retrain to use lyx, in one way or another? Not unless we fail to retrain them and they go back to msoffice after spending money and effort, IMO. Well, that factor always exists when teaching people to do something, but we should at least try (with the great majority of them). > > So we are left with word processing as a driving skill analogy. If you > test people for field of view and parallel concentration before giving > them a driver's license, you will get much better drivers, and less > accidents. However, since you define, apriory, that anyone who wants to > and can vest the money should be able to get a license, you can not > perform these tests. I didn't ask to filter out people who can't use lyx from having a license to use a word procesor. I asked to help them learn to be qualified for that license. One of the things I really hate (to happen to me) is when I'm forced to use msword to collaborate with other people (or just submit work in the .doc format). This happened once in a while in school - openoffice 1.1 wasn't available back then yet, so I had to use windows, too. And these other people were forced to use msword, for precisely the same reason! There was no other reason, because word is obviously the wrong tool for the task at hand (and we didn't even use its revision tracking and comments features). When handing in a .doc as a (large-scale) schoolwork, I spend at least as much time manually formatting it and making sure it would look the same with other versions of msword, or even with other installations of msword, as I did actually writing the text. This is 100% wasted effort in the greater scheme of things. And so I say again that msword is the wrong tool for 90% of the jobs people use it for. Besides, if we have to standardize over a wordprocessing format, latex would be much preferrable to msword :-) For one thing, you can choose your own editor, the format is universal. -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
pgp00000.pgp
Description: signature
