Cant resist all this OS talk somehow-- almost turns this list into the
one like liferaft no?
I used to tell people about Unix,
``It is heard to do easy things and easy to do hard things''
Unix in particular, and CLS in general are obviously more like natural
languages, with a base vocabulary of units, and some combining rules that
permit one to creatively create an infinite number of program combinations
(e.g., as Chomsky says we can say an infinite number of sentences).
The menu/mouse idea, appropriately obtained by by Xerox, studying kids,
is to pre-design the set of things people want to do, and then make it
easy to do them without memorizing a lot of pesky vocabulary, rules,
etc, memorizing things - - . But then you can not do anything the
originators of an OS/application have not already designed it to let you
do. That is why, as the number of task combinations in MS word or whatever
grows the submenus and hotkeys and wierdness starts to grow as well.
There is/was something about the philosophy of Unix, -- some kind of
pride in creating and knowing things that are hard to figure out. I
think it is still there. Unix error messages remain a subject for
special Tiban monks, where my memory of most dos messages was they
were more or less in plain english.
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Howard Schwartz
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howardbschwartz "at" california.com
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