Re: SIL Toolbox and IPA Unicode 1.0

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
 For the last three years
> I, as a computer
> scientist, have been teaching students "Human
> Computer Interface". I made
> extensive use of Ben Sheiderman's excellent book
> "Designing the User
> Interface". Who is Ben Sheiderman? A professor of
> *computer science* at
> the University of Maryland. He is also a pioneer in
> user-interface design
> and done much valuable research in this area.
>
> Ben Sheiderman is a guy I can and do respect. Your
> insult is ill-informed
> and IMO contemptuous.
I perfectly respect Ben Sheiderman, whoever he might
be. The fact is that I never had to cope with his
theories. I have to cope with ordinary computers and
software. I'm not working in a university, but in a
normal office, with normal people. What planet are you
living on ?

> Get real, please! What planet do you live on?
Earth, France, 2004 AD, if that's how it should be
written.

> > But I, as a
> > user, don't give a damn about what the smart
> > specialist thinks. I got a fucking tool,
>
> I assume you're not familiar enough with colloquial
> English to realize
> what you've just written!
Ah, an interesting point that had escaped me so far. I
just tried to look American, and I heard that the
first rule to speak American is to say "fuck" every
fourth word, as an average. But true, "fucking tool"
sounds, ehm, weird.
>
> > Philippe, if you don't like "vi", use another
> editor. Somebody using bad
> > tools should blame themselves for not finding
> better tools, not the
> > toolsmith for making something that satisfies
> millions of other people.
>
> Quite so. I remember being told many times as a
> youngster "The good
> workman never blames his tools".
Look, we got an AIX system, and it was delivered with:
vi, emacs, ed and INed, whatever it may be. This
system is recent. If they are modern good tools, why
weren't they included in the package ? Why do I have
to make an inquiry to know what the supposed good
tools are, and how to get them ? And, believe it or
not, most of the people working today on Unix still
use vi ! And they are proud to know that Esc-ZZ means
something, and ^z means something else. That's why I
said "stone age".

The fact that "millions of people" are satisfied with
vi isn't really an argument to me. Millions of people
are satisfied with George Bush or Jacques Chirac.
That's their problem. My problem is having a good (and
intuitive) tool to get my work done.
>
> >
> > That's not uncommon: PHP and Perl do it. You're
> bitching about nothing
> > there. Most languages designers attempt to keep
> things familiar and only
> > change things if they can't think of any other
> clean way to do it.
>
> Yes, I did try to explain this to Philippe a few
> weeks back. I agree he's
> bitching about nothing, but he won't be convinced.
>
OK, my problem is, for ex, the following: as I'm
learning some JavaScript now (but it could be anything
else), I try writing small programs or functions in
Javascript and look how it works, or doesn't. In about
75% of the cases, when it doesn't work, it's because
of syntax problems: I know perfectly what I want to do
and how I would write it in a language I know, but
Javascript decided it was no good and I had to write
it another way (BTW, I'm just reading Flanagan's
JavaScript, and I'm horrified by the consequences of
using the same symbol, "+", both for concatenating and
adding - about type conversions, for ex. WHY had they
to do that ?). Anyway, all the time I spend on these
syntax problems I consider as lost for productivity.


=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


		
_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush

Replies