6 Apr
2008
6 Apr
'08
10:36 a.m.
Some of them are still accurate. Others are a little
outdated. Some,
and these are the ones that kinda annoy me, are the kind of complaints
that people come up with when they are unwilling to think outside of
their favored OS's techniques. I mean, the complaints about command
names? "rm" is not particularly intuitive, but good things require a
little learning. I admit that TOPS-XX and VMS did pretty good with the
ability to shorten command names, but "DELETE" is only one of several
possible commands a new user might try--"REMOVE", "JUNK", etc.
I've yet to find any user interface that doesn't need learning. It took
me a long time to work out how to change directories under VMS -- coming
from a Unix/OS9 background, SET DEFAULT was hardly
expected.
And on the Mac, I first thoguht that if dragging a file to the trash
deleted it, then dragging a disk to the trash should reformat it.
There's also the danger of confusing 'easy to learn' with 'easy to
use'.
Some things are easy to learn becuase they're so limited in what you can
do there just isn't that much to learn. Personnally, I'd prefer a more
powerful system that will actually help me to get the job done, even if I
ahve to spend a fair amount of time learning to use it properly. Good
tools (no mattter what sort of tool) need practice to use properly.
-tony