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From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Computers for users not programmers
Message-ID: <4724@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 29 Jan 91 13:08:36 GMT
References: <1991Jan28.112723.15274@lth.se> <12830@lanl.gov>
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In article <12830@lanl.gov>, jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
> From article <1991Jan28.112723.15274@lth.se>, by magnus%thep.lu.se@Urd.lth.se (Magnus Olsson):
> > [...]
> > Users aren't stupid (at least, not most of them). However, most of them lack
> > the energy and motivation to think like programmers.  [...]
> 
> It has nothing to do with motivation or intelligence.  It's just a matter
> of cost-effectiveness.  If it takes longer to learn to do something than
> the value of being able to do it - it's _more_ intelligent _not_ to
> learn it.
> 
> > [...]                                                Instead of forcing people
> > to adapt to computers, wouldn't it be much nicer if we adapted computers to 
> > people? 
> 
> Exactly!!
> 
> J. Giles

This is exactly wrong.  It assumes that the computer can be programmed to do
exactly what the user wants.  In my experience, this is far from the case.

What does happen is that the user is taught that what the guru has put in
the language, system, etc., is what the computer is capable of.  The user
is deliberately kept from even finding out the capabilities of the hardware,
and then the hardware is built in such a way as to make these capabilities
difficult and expensive.

To adapt computers to people, we have to let the people who can understand
what hardware can be capable of to get into the act.  One of the recent
"developments" is to separate integer and floating-point operations.  Now
that some people cannot see the need for not doing this does not mean it
should not be done, nor that it should be made expensive.  High accuracy
arithmetic can be done in floating point, but it is a real mess; usually
one makes the floating point emulate fixed point.

The same applies to packages.  They rarely do what is really needed, or they
do it clumsily.

BC (before computers), it was necessary for the user to put together what was
wanted.  This is programming.
--
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)   {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)