This remind me of a discussion a very long time ago on a newsgroup
- a young zealot of GUI (windows, buttons, mouses) was asking himself
and the community how people could deny that this was the best interface
on earth or how anybody could prefer text based interface
- a seasonned sys. admin then started to explain all the clicks he had
to perform to create one new user account. Result: for one new user some
minutes of work
He then added that he had to create HUMDREDS of user every year and was
so very happy that he did not had to do it all by pointing and clicking
but had some scripts to do it.
So the answer to all this is that there are very good and valid reasons
to prefer text to all the shiny interfaces of he world.
And you don't even have to look very far to find some.
As for programming with in a graphical way, the ability has been around
for decades.
I believe we can safely assume that if people are still using textual
interface after such a very long period (in computer science time
frame), it is most certainly because natural selection has favoured the
choice that had most advantages ...
nicolas
PS: which does not mean that GUI are completely useless
On 21/04/2015 20:03, kilon alios wrote:
Funnily enough I am in the exact opposite opinion, of Graphical
approach being vastly superior to text based approach including
programming languages. 25 years using computers and coding with them
and still cannot fathom why programming languages are still a think
and why developers and "power" users rely so much on text based
approach. But whether I like it or not the coding world is dominated
by text based solutions.
Its a pointless debate though when it comes to pharo will depend on
the people doing the work. Personally I don't have the time of going
very deep into this and doing all the hard work it requires. My focus
is elsewhere. But I welcome any contribution.
As a lawyer myself and a coder, I cannot even begin to compare Latex
to the convenience of Libreoffice I use at work. Its not even a debate
. Latex is something I never heard of until Pillar introduced me to
it. Can't imagine who in the right mind would use this to document
things, but I guess they have their reasons.
I started with command line and CP/M back in 1988 but even back then
when GUIs were not mainstream (at least in my country) I was dreaming
of graphical intefaces that would lift me from the restrictions of
text based approach and the dreaded command line. I wish I had found
out about Smalltalk back then and its elegant solution to this problem.
I love Pillar because its simple and I like the syntax, but yeah in
the end I would choose a Graphical Documentation Tool no questions asked.
On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Dmitri Zagidulin
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 12:15 PM, Sean P. DeNigris
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I dream that all documents in my Dynabook are WYSIWYG.
However, the
computing world seems to have regressed into writing documents
in various
forms of assembly code.
Completely disagree, that it's a regression in any way :)
Text-based document writing has enabled so many more features
than WYSIWYG approaches have ever dreamed of. I would be happy to
debate the merits of the two approaches, feature-for-feature.
You're basically pining for the equivalent of VisualBasic drag &
drop programming, versus the flexibility of writing code in an
editor. The latter wins, no contest. (Now, that is not to say that
text-based code editing can't be /improved/ with better IDE tools,
that's what we're all about after all.)
