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From: herndon@umn-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Modern Software Tool Interface
Message-ID: <7500009@umn-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Apr-86 14:33:00 EST
Article-I.D.: umn-cs.7500009
Posted: Fri Apr  4 14:33:00 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Apr-86 01:18:39 EST
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Nf-ID: #R:ztivax:-790000200:umn-cs:7500009:000:1145
Nf-From: umn-cs!herndon    Apr  4 13:33:00 1986


  I too am concerned about the influx of new "tools".
These systems are quite convenient for users, since they
are graphic and a user can learn to use them in a matter
of hours.  For this reason, they are quite powerful,
economical, and worthy of a permanent place in the realm
of computer arts and sciences.  I think, though, that
calling the graphic window things "tools" is somewhat
misleading.
  The tool concept is also used to mean (by Kernighan,
et. al) to mean simple programs for doing things (like
'grep', 'sort', 'uniq', etc.) and the glue to put these
things together (shell, file redirection, pipes, arguments,
etc.) to form useful programming tasks.
  My concern is that the latter concept is being entirely
lost.  Things such as editor scripts (does anyone remember
them?) are now relatively rare, in spite of things like
'sed', ostensibly designed to replace them.  Graphic
interfaces exacerbate this loss because it discourages
users/programmers from thinking of editors/mailers/...
as programmable.  Aside from 'idioms' such as
  eqn | tbl | nroff
or
  ... | more
how often are interesting pipelines seen nowadays?

				Robert