Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!mcvax!ukc!icdoc!qmc-cs!liam
From: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: You can do anything in (state your favorite word processor)
Message-ID: <191@cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 1-Sep-86 05:42:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: cs.191
Posted: Mon Sep  1 05:42:09 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Sep-86 21:27:30 EDT
References: <158@tcdmath.UUCP> <142@darth.UUCP>
Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Organization: CS Dept, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK.
Lines: 47
Summary: Something rotten in this state of Demark

Sender:

Keywords:


> Any WordStar stories?

"A mere abacus: consider it not."       - HHGTTG


Seriously, doesn't this whole correspondence suggest that
somewhere we are doing something very wrong? Why have people
found it necessary to produce text-editors so powerful that
they can compute Feynmann diagrams, polynomial coefficients and
pretend to be link editors?  Are such programs the way to turn your
computer from a useless lump of silicon into a tool which
really helps you do whatever it is you do, or are they a
ghastly waste of effort?

The Unix file is an uninterpreted stream of bytes: some of
these streams are finite and repeatable, so we call them text
files and invent programs to manipulate them. Then we
differentiate them by given them interpretations; this is a
source code file, this is an object file, this is a bit map,
this is human-readable text.

Having editors that can operate on the common abstraction
sounds like a good idea; I certainly find it useful to be able
to create letters and source code with the same editor, instead
of having to use different ones (can you do this with MacWrite,
I wonder?). But the problem comes when we add extra semantics
to the information - it is very hard to edit an executable
object file and get a sensible, executable result and with
graphical information, the text abstraction is even less
tractable. Giving the editor enough muscle to allow arbitrary
programs to be written and applied to the text is just a way of
changing the editor so that it preserves some of the extra
meaning that you give to the text.

The $64,000 question is this:   can it ever work?

If we waved a magic wand over TECO or EMACS or VI or whatever,
transforming its user-interface into something really civilised
and easy-to-use, would we get the Philosopher's touchstone
which turns computers into gold?  If not, what are the
*fundamental* problems with this approach (embellishing text
editors) and what should we be working on instead?
-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam@qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-980 4811 ext 3900