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From: ken@rochester.ARPA (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Confusing Confusion with Technical Issues
Message-ID: <28110@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 27-May-87 12:24:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.28110
Posted: Wed May 27 12:24:24 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 29-May-87 06:29:55 EDT
References: <8705181811.AA05417@maximo.uucp> <29@aimmi.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (Ken Yap)
Distribution: world
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 45

|Shame - the fact is that you cannot duck these style issues. Unless
|the range of options in user interface design is understood by the
|software designers, they'll not know when they're trading off ease of
|future user interface programming for ease of hacking their user
|interface toolkits. Ever seen a hammer designer who doesn't understand
|nails, wood or the human arm? Software tools implementation is full of such
|people.
|
|P.S. the trivialisation of serious ergonomic issues to "religious"
|bickering is another mark of the technical mentality - nothing like a
|difficult, knowledge intensive, empirical, open-ended, concept-intensive
|unresolved problem for sending the technophiles scurrying off to their
|workbenches and pretending there's no BEST answer so ANY one (i.e.
|theirs!) will do.  Could it be that the arch hacker has the lowest possible
|closure threshold for intellectual debate and reasoned decision making
|in a noisy environment? :-)

Tsk. You read far too much into a single word "religious". I am not
suggesting ducking the issues or trivializing them. I'm am certainly
not suggesting that X is the last word in windowing systems.

Your example of what V7 lacks is just the right point.  The
improvements came after experience had been accumulated and
shortcomings exposed.  If Ritchie and Thompson had argued about styles
of command interpreters instead of providing a basic mechanism and
leaving that decision to a different, *higher* level, Unix would not
have seen the light of day.

Unless one believes that it is impossible to have layered
implementations, that a single designer has to have every skill under
the sun rolled in to even begin to start on the problem, instead of
having people from various disciplines divide the problem into
manageable pieces and refine the overall design by discussing
problems.

In other words, if one believes <favourite window system> fails to
provide the *mechanism* for implementing <favourite interface style>,
then one should speak up so that future designers know what to work
on.

	Ken

PS: It always looks silly to make sweeping statements about the
characteristics of a class of people in a single paragraph, smiley face
notwithstanding.  It just degenerates to ad hominem mud slinging.