🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 27 Mar 1997 01:07:44 +0800, Dimitri Maziuk <dima@eris.dev.null> wrote:

>> : democratic, we have to start looking at ergonomic and useability issues.
>
>Well, that one is about as old as the question whether there is God
>on Mars.  Plenty of peole will tell you that command line interface
>is far more ergonomic and usable than point-and-wait.

Alas, what is ergonomic is infinitely mutable and dependant on the user and
the situation.  But I have a good idea of what is *not* ergonomic.  Here are
some examples:

Creating a graphical environment, and then requiring that graphical
environment be manipulated by editing a hopelessly confusing set of
"X-resource" files is *not* ergonomic.

Configuring each application with a set of dot-files, each of which has its
own special syntax and a huge litany of options is *not* ergonomic.

Having dozens of different text-editors, each having their own unique keyboard
short-cuts to do the same things is *not* ergonomic.

Vi and Elvis are never ergonomic.

Commands that give no indication of their activity, or any information on
successful completion (ie rm *) are *not* ergonomic.

Commands that don't have safety checks for particularly dangerous commands
are *not* ergonomic (ie rm -rf .*)

>BTW, what's your definition of "truly democratic"?  I thought linux
>was pretty democratic, if "demos" refers to linux community.
>(Excuse my Greek.  I'm not being serious, if you haven't noticed :)

Without being too serious, the definition of "democratic" I'm using is
something like:

"accessible to a user who's reasonably intelligent, but who doesn't wish to
waste endless amounts of time trying to understand the syntactical gibberish
of a sendmail configuration file.  Someone who is happy to learn appropriate
skills, but doesn't want to waste time in endless skill duplication. 
Someone who has the entirely reasonable expectation that most of their
interaction with their computer will be graphical, not text-based.  Someone
like the typical Windows user."

-- 

Jason Stokes: j.stokes@bohm.anu.edu.au
Ph: +61 (06) 291 93 84