Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!nosc!crash!ncr-sd!se-sd!jim
From: jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Windows 3 criticism
Message-ID: <3958@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 3 Oct 90 15:17:33 GMT
References: <4297@rex.cs.tulane.edu> <57914@microsoft.UUCP> <6I56PF3@xds2.ferranti.com>
Organization: NCR Corporation, Systems Engineering - San Diego
Lines: 39

In article <6I56PF3@xds2.ferranti.com> karl@ficc.ferranti.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
>However, there are things you can do from the Unix shell, for example, that I 
>have yet to see anything like under a windowing environment, other than in a
>shell within a window... powerful things like simple programs that manipulate
>data in standard ways being hooked together with pipes.
 
>In a windowing environment, you'd have to double click on your compressor,
>your uudecoder, your editor, etc, and do it by hand, click-click, moving
>around from program to program and reentering data like filenames and such
>to each program.  You could record a macro, but that's a kludge, really,
>and besides, there are a lot of if-type decisions to be made, like is this
>file compressed or not, and so forth.

For a language-creation user interface that is poorly thought out, this
is true.  But you can also build such macros much quicker in a GUI by
displaying icons and disabling those that are irrelavent to the current
options you have available.  

For instance, you would start will all "command" icons displayed - the
"if... then..." icon, the "assignment" icon, the "print..." icon, etc.
Once one of them is selected, say the "print.." icon, all the command
icons are disabled and the icons showing the object that can be
printed are enabled.

This method makes it impossible to make syntax errors and is a good guide
to the language itself, allowing you to bypass some of the "manual", 
which is hard to get at on UNIX anyway.

>But for the most part, there are not yet efficient windoing equivalents to 
>many of the things we are used to doing, like shell scripts and, dare I
>say it, programming.

There are a growing number of user interface methodologies that need only
be implemented by programmers and software manufacturers in order to
efficiently build such things as languages that let you avoid entire
classes of errors (e.g., syntax errors).


-Jim Ruehlin