From: Tyler Zesiger Date: 2004-06-12T04:32:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Switch to .ruby extension? [OT] I think I may be earning myself a reputation as a user-friendliness Nazi, but I see no reason why a CLI can't be *very* user friendly. For example, if someone types in "copy", it could spit out some context-sensitive help about the right way to do a copy. These are the nice little touches that take a product into the realm of maturity, in my opinion. When it's so well designed, and so well understood by the designers, that it's designed to help you get to where you're trying to go, even when you're not exactly sure how to proceed. Most people argue that, if you've got the gumption to use Unix, you've got the gumption to hike the learning curve - And if you need to have your hand held along the way, you're better off with a GUI'd OS anyways. All of that may be true, but it's beside the point. The point is that the paradigm is all wrong. To intentionally make things cryptic, and then to leave them that way for decades on end is deplorable, and speaks volumes about the direction that The Powers That Be are headed in. Is it a crime to make a powerful and sophisticated software system easy enough for children to use? Is it so bad if all the complexity is tucked away under a nice interface until needed? (Be it command line or GUI, or who knows what else). MacOSX seems to be a hit with Mac users. Apparently, shoving all the sophistication under the rug has worked for them. *nix OS's are a decade behind in the UI/user-friendliness department, and there's no good reason for it to be like that. The hardcore hackers don't need to lose anything if Timmy The Five Year Old has an overlying interface to Unix that makes sense to him, so why the incredible opposition to user-friendliness? My beef is with *nix people who think user-friendliness is a bad thing - A threat to their way of thinking. It's utter nonsense. Software is kind of a commodity these days, in that oftentimes, you can't even give it away. That which isn't used, has no value. That which is used more, has more value. The user-friendliness paradigm in the *nix world should change, it makes no difference whether it necessarily needs to or not. Everything good, should be easy to use, otherwise, it might as well not be so good. If someone out there isn't able to use it, for that person, it doesn't even exist. That's the way I think. Mark Hubbart wrote: > > On Jun 11, 2004, at 10:55 AM, Tyler Zesiger wrote: > >> I remember when I first started using linux (now I use FreeBSD, which >> is no better in this regard), I spent an hour trying to figure out how >> to copy a file..."copy" didn't work. Searching the internet for info >> on "copying" didn't turn up anything, probably because Google wasn't >> what it is now, back then. I had to finally get on IRC and ask someone >> how to copy - Turns out it's "cp". It will take me a decade of typing >> "cp", with it's two fewer letters than "copy", to earn back the hour >> it took me to figure out the command in the first place. > > > heh :) I had a similar experience, coming from a Mac, with no command > line, to a Mac running OS X, with a full fledged UNIX interface, when > you want it... it was all very frustrating until a friend pointed me in > the direction of the 'apropos' tool. After that, it was mostly smooth > sailing. > > I don't think that there should be extra commands littering up the one > monolithic namespace of shell commands. A simple 'help' tool, which > relays a few ways of finding various commands, should, IMHO, be > included. A few tips about apropos, man, and a short note about how > command line arguments work. That would be enough, I think, to get a > determined person up and running. > > cheers, > Mark > > > >