Re: CHAT: programming langs

Lars Henrik Mathiesen writes:
 > > Date:         Mon, 15 Nov 1999 17:22:30 -0800
 > > From: Charles <catty@...>
 >
 > > What I'm thinking about *is* a true language, or at least
 > > a step or two closer to one, which is both humanly speakable
 > > and usable as a replacement for GUI's and the old shells.

 > That is a nice idea, but in the real world I don't think there will be
 > time for it to become useful. These things take 10 to 15 years at
 > least to go from bright idea to widespread adoption, and by then a
 > developer's workstation will be powerful enough to use plain English
 > as a specification language.

Um, no.  Not the power - that will be there. The problem is using
English as a specification language. It doesn't work. Specifications
today are not all prose. They can include complex diagrams, formal
symbols, and all sorts of other non-English stuff.

 > > But we should be able to say, "hey mars probe, assume metric
 > > coordinates except when running that stupid xyz program".
 >
 > Like this.

Again, won't work. It lacks precision. The human designers effectively
did not say "Hey, Mars Probe! Let's do everything in metric!" or even
"everything but this part over here." This is a commn occurance in
spoken language - we leave things out and the listener has to infer
what is meant.  That's harder than even understanding the speech
stream - it requires knowledge of the world.  Forget compute power -
this is an open research problem.

 > > Brook Conner wrote:
 > >
 > > > Speech isn't going to supplant guis for the tasks that guis are doing
 > > > today - you aren't going to do much in desktop publishing with a
 > > > speech interface - it would be clumsy, and whether or not it actually
 > > > was slower, users would feel it was slower (odd factoid - keyboard
 > > > shortcuts take *more* time than mousing to a menu - people jsut
 > > > *think* they're shorter because their mind is busy with the keyboard,
 > > > but idle with the mouse).
 >
 > Hmmm... I think that depends on what tasks you're doing, and how good
 > you are at remembering shortcut sequences. Insisting on navigating a

Of course - the point was that *even* when users *thought* the
keyboard was faster, there were times when it *wasn't*. The user's
perception of speed is *not* an accurate metric of speed.

 [ other specific examples deleted ...]

 > I'd still like to be able to just say 'delete rest of text and send'.

Sure would be nice, but what happens when you realize that what the
computer thought was the "rest" is not what you thought it was? "and
send...." oops.

My point was not that *all* menu actions are faster - my point was
that different UI actions have different *perceived* durations that
*do not* match wall clock time.

 > And it also depends on how good the UI is at making the keyboard or
 > the mouse useful. Posting dialogs with the OK button under the pointer
 > is good.

Maybe - if it is an information-only dialog, putting it under the
cursor is obstructive. UI design simply is not that simple.

 > And if only the Windows file dialog would start 'positioned'
 > (dashed outline, not selecting) at the last file opened by the
 > application, "try the next one instead" would be CTRL+F4 CTRL+O DOWN
 > ENTER.

Um, clearly a very easy key sequence to remember :-)

 > (Would be useful with a mouse too, I always forget where in the
 > list of files I'd gotten to. My digital camera produces hundreds of
 > files all called something like mvc-123s.jpg).

A product of brain-damaged software design by Sony engineers more
interested in reducing product cost than providing useful, intelligent
abilities.


Brook

---------
Backups? We don' NEED no steenking backups.

---------
Fancy. Myth. Magic.
http://www.concentric.net/~nellardo/