🚀 go-pugleaf

>From Goldberg@RUTGERS Thu Aug 12 01:53:11 1982
In-Reply-To: Mark Horton's message of 26-Jul-82 1627-EDT

Good documentation of a canonical subset of commands in a program will
certainly help a great deal.  Many programs (including the mail program
I am using to send this message) present the first-time user with a
screenful of commands in response to a "?" or HELP command; only a
small subset of these is actually required to perform the basic
tasks the program was designed for.  

Despite good documentation, an editor (or any command language for
that matter) that has many commands that a user does not want to
learn at a first sitting can be a problem if it is too easy to
mistype a basic command and end up doing something strange to the
file.  It is even worse if the mode changes and the old commands
no longer work.  This problem is particularly common with video
editors because they tend to use cryptic commands requiring only
a few keystrokes.  As the command language grows, it becomes more
"dense" in the sense that a randomly typed sequence is more and
more likely to be a valid, though unintended, command.  

I would argue that an editor with a "dense" command language can
grow to have so many commands that it is no longer easy to learn
to use its basic commands, simply because it is too likely that
the user will type an unknown command with strange side effects.

				Bob Goldberg
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