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From: throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: GUI vs Text (was Re: Virtual Manipulation)
Summary: agree hybrid strategy is preferable
Message-ID: <2114@sheol.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jun 91 00:55:15 GMT
References: <6gH233w164w@bluemoon.uucp> <1991Jun5.181727.17833@nas.nasa.gov> <1991Jun06.030356.26351@lynx.CS.ORST.EDU>
Lines: 60

- bmb@bluemoon.uucp (Bryan Bankhead):
    Text is not flexible.  PEOPLE primarily communicate in text 
    and PEOPLE are flexible.  

- uselton@nas.nasa.gov (Samuel P. Uselton):
    [...] the COMPLEXITY of the syntax is 
    directly proportional to the number of ways the
    elements can be arranged MEANINGFULLY.  It is this LARGE set of 
    potentially available meanings that embody the POWER of a CLI.  

I agree more with Samuel than Bryan.  Though I agree with Bryan that
text is not *inherently* more flexible than visual, gestural, or other
vehicles that convey meaning, it still seems to be the case that
*current* text-based command interpreters are far more flexible than
*current* GUI-based command interpreters.  This may well be due to the
longer track record of the TBCIs. 

GUICIs are currently poor at expressing algorithms to embody needed
customizations, and especially poor at providing a general mechanism for
binding referents to formal parameters to such algorithms.  I emphasize:
this is not intrinsic to GUIs as far as I can tell. 

> You could make a GUI with a similar level of complexity, but you would
> be defeating the purpose. 

I don't necessarily agree here, though.  "The purpose" of a GUI is
(I suppose) to take advantage of hand-eye co-ordination, and (to a
lesser extent, but still important) to rely less on memory and more
on recognition.  (Of course, GUIs are often "sold" on the second
virtue, but it is secondary IMO, and is not a unique feature of GUIs:
consider for example menu or command-completion text-based systems.)

ANYway, the expressive power of the gestural language is an orthogonal
issue to either of these purposes.

Consider for an analogy the world of human languages.  Humans primarily
use spoken languages, with an admixture of body language.  Yet, as
formal sign languages show, there is no *fundamental* reason why
gestural (GUI) languages can't be as rich and expressive as spoken
(text) languages.

- mcbeeb@jacobs.CS.ORST.EDU (Brian Mcbee):
    For some things I use the GUI, and for some things I use the CLI.
    I find this far more flexible than either one individually.

This is the way I operate, also.  There are some places (many
places) where gestures are more efficient, and others where they aren't
available (eg: over a low-bandwidth connection, or in specifying "batch"
or "cron" or "daemon" activities). 

Of course, there is no particular reason why GUIs could not eventually
displace text essentially universally.  But for now (or rather, since
this is comp.society.futures, "for the forseeable future"), I'd prefer
that, similar to the "radical" idea that interactive command and "batch"
languages be identical, there should as far as possible be a one-to-one
correspondence between a tool's GUI and text interfaces.  This is
clearly not impossible, or even hard, to do.  It just isn't done very
well very often. 
--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw