Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnewsm!mls
From: mls@cbnewsm.ATT.COM (mike.siemon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Text file madness: diagnosis & prescription.
Summary: word processors and kitchen sinks
         (and suggestions on user interfaces)
Message-ID: <8526@cbnewsm.ATT.COM>
Date: 13 Jan 90 18:42:28 GMT
References: <2706@aecom.yu.edu> <5900@ncar.ucar.edu> <1998@eric.mpr.ca> <12501@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 57

In article <12501@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>, dave@PRC.Unisys.COM
(David Lee Matuszek) writes:

> > for all I know Word may have buried arithmetic capabilites, too --
> > possibly hanging off the KitchenSink menu.)
> 
> I don't know about Word 3.x, but yes, Word 4.0 does have arithmetic
> capabilites.  I forget which menu, as usual.  But please don't judge
> the Mac by MS Word.  MS Word is widely regarded as one of the most
> "un-Mac-like" programs around, despite the fact that it's the most
> widely used word processor.

My point was not Microsoft-bashing nor judging the Mac by its most-used
application.  The point is that it is absurd to expect Word, or any other
program, to have the capability to do *anything* that I might happen to
want to do with some generic file (scanned in, downloaded, or whatever.)
The problem is how to COMBINE data (files) of many different types and
sources with operations (applications) of equally diverse origins and type.
And as a combinatorial problem, it *must* be handled abstractly or else
it simply cannot be handled beyond the first few steps of complification.

What we tend to get are appplications that *sort of* do everything they
*think* we need -- word processors that aspire to page layout, that have
built-in drawing programs, built-in style-checkers, built-in spreadsheets
and so on _ad infinitum_.  Such an approach is *not* general -- it is
simply an expensive ginsu knife.

The use of DAs, and even more of CDEVs, relieves the problem considerably
-- for example, I can use the same spelling checker in any text-oriented
program (as long as it implements the Edit menu adequately.)  More of that
kind of *orthogonal* functionality is what is needed.  For example, while
in my word processor, I drag out a selection of some columns of figures,
operate on these by invoking a Mathematica sort of package whose results
I feed into a digital darkroom in order to get a picture that I place in
the original text I started working on.  Now I start commenting on the
features of this image, and decide that I need further image-enhancement,
so I tweak the transformations either in the math package or the darkroom.

Clipboards and DAs and such *suggest* this kind of functionality, but
they also fragment it into unique individual operations, and there is no
"metalanguage" -- no algebra -- in which to decribe *always* doing that
text -> math -> image-processing -> page layout operation (or better
still, conditionally doing it!) at that stage in a document.  What I
have in mind is any application being able to open any other application
in some local context (up to the whole document) of the current file.

The CMU Andrew environment seems to me to exhibit this sort of generality
in a way the Mac does not.  (Speaking from a *very* slight aquaintence
with that, and no personal use of it; Andrew users might enlighten me as
to whether there is more promise than reality in this view of things!)
At any rate, Andrew comes closer to a 2-D generalization of the UNIX pipe-
line model than anything else that has come to my attention.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		There is no algorithm for human interaction.
...!cucard!dasys1!mls		There is no decision procedure for tuning
...!att!sfbat!mls		into other people's emotions.
standard disclaimer	  				     -- Mara Chibnik