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Path: utzoo!utcsstat!laura
From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng,net.nlang
Subject: Re: expert-friendly: are long names a waste of time?
Message-ID: <1490@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 27-Nov-83 23:53:45 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1490
Posted: Sun Nov 27 23:53:45 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 28-Nov-83 00:38:58 EST
References: <6196@watmath.UUCP>, <507@dciem.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 69

I have been thinking about those long names. They will be a pain to type,
right? So I will either have a shorter-to-type private version in my bin,
or the command interpreter will understand abbreviations (perhaps like
TOPS-20). So the question is "who are the long commands for"?

there are people who like Ian Allen, find them aesthetically pleasing.
this is all any very good for them, but if this is the primary reason
then we can just ask Ian Allen to put long forms in *his* bin...

there are novice users. Now, we never settled this the last time, but I
still think that novice users have a very short lifetime. Give them a
week or a month and they can learn to use "grep" and "cat" like the
rest of us. It is possible to design systems for them, but this is
(in my opinion) silly. They will be experts too quickly and will have
the same complaints about the long names that the rest of us have --
they take too long to type. Thus it is only the marketing types that
have "novice users" as their primary concern, since all they have to
do is SELL the product -- once they have sold it it becomes the problem
of the 'support staff' or some other group...

there are casual users. I define casual users to be users that never
will use the system often enough to become an expert -- or who use the
system infrequently enough that they have to relearn the system every time
as if "from scratch". Shoppers using a computerised store directory are
the first sort, and professors who use the system once a year to put in
a grant request and their latest paper are the second sort.

I have come to the conclusion that these people are the primary 
beneficiaries of the 'long name' command syntaxes. But now that I
have isolated (what I perceive as) the problem, I have come to the
astonishing conclusion that THESE FOLK DON'T WANT LONG NAMES.
These are the people who want menus. They want a pop-up menu with the
answer to every possible mess they could get themselves into. 

Now, what is it that the long words have over the menus...

THE MENUS TAKE TOO LONG TO GET DRAWN ON THE SCREENS.

(we will assume that you have solved the 'from leaf to leaf I'm
want to leap, across the branches I'm forced to creep' problem. It is
hard, but not unsurrmountable.) The menus take forever to come up
and get drawn. this problem is exacerbated by people who want to make
it clear to the user that they knew every feature that the vt100 has,
and thus play multiple bells and draw funny pictures in inverse video and
play with the scrolling regions. It looks spiff-o but it *takes too
long*. The problem with a menu system is that I can type faster than
it will give me the menus, so I get pissed off with the whole thing.

But this is not an inherant problem with menus. IT JUST MEANS THAT THE
HARDWARE WAS NOT DESIGNED FOR MENUS. So if you had real slick fast
hardware that didn't think that it was an ascii typewriter you could get
a blindingly fast menu system. What if you  had multiple windows
(a la blits) and if the menu maintaining stuff lived in your terminal...

I dunno folks. I think that the idea has merit, but then I haven't
heard *anybody* talking about "hardware that thinks that it is a
typewriter being user-hostile". I have yet to see the HARDWARE DESIGN
raked over the coals as I just did...and there are a fair number of
vociferous coal-rakers in the field of human factors...

Maybe bitmapped displays are too new, or maybe I have been reading the
wrong articles. What do other people think? I have just killed the
pro-"long command names" group by assuming that long commands are
menu-replacements that are useful only because menus take too long
to draw on the screen -- probably that is unfair. But, for the life of
me, I can't see what else they are for...

Laura (puzzled) Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura