From: Tyler Zesiger <mailing-lists@...>
Date: 2004-06-15T08:13:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Switch to .ruby extension?

I don't know how much of the thread you read through, but I repeated at 
least half a dozen times that the command line isn't the issue. It's the 
general anti-userfriendliness mentality in the *nix community. I just 
started with "cp" as an example.



SER 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.
> 
> 
> I know exactly what you mean, because "dir" and "del" in DOS are *so*
> intuitive.  In fact, "copy" is also elitist; "duplicate" is even more
> user friendly.
> 
> All sarcasm aside, I don't think anything short of a decent AI
> interpreter will make the command line "user friendly".  There's a
> threshold before which trying to make things more user friendly is
> counter productive -- you don't really save most people any time
> learning the system (except in a few edge cases), and you make things
> more painful on a day-to-day basis for people who already know the
> system.  Beyond that threshold, of course, a system *can* be user
> friendly enough to make the extra typing worthwhile.  I'd *love* to be
> able to tell my system, in plain English (or German, or French, or
> Esperanto) "Open the most recent version of my resume in openoffice".
> Anything less than that is just optimizing the syntax for a select
> group, and Linux (and Unix) chooses that group to be people who use the
> shell enough to appreciate the fewer keystrokes.
> 
> If you don't agree with me, odds are *really* good that you've never
> played Zork.  I'm not the first to argue that that trying to make
> things more natural is worse than not trying at all if you can't meet
> that threshold.
> 
> --- SER
> 
> 
> 
>