Re: CHAT: programming langs

> 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.

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

> 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
file dialog from the keyboard is usually a waste of time, so to use
CTRL+O to post it is pointless, especially if you have to move your
hand from the mouse to do it; dismissing an expected warning message
dialog by pressing space, instead of waiting to see where it gets
drawn and moving the mouse to the OK button, is almost always a win.

Deleting the long included text you didn't want in a web mailer reply
is CTRL+SHIFT+END DELETE; with a mouse you have to drag over it and
wait for the browser to scroll the window down agonizingly slowly. But
I'd still like to be able to just say 'delete rest of text and send'.

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. 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. (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).

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)