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From: bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Large programs
Message-ID: <9725@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 9-Oct-87 19:17:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.9725
Posted: Fri Oct  9 19:17:41 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 11-Oct-87 16:44:11 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
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From: stpeters@dawn.steinmetz
>A more reasonable philosophy would be that features that someone,
>*anyone*, wants and that do no harm are ok.  'ls' is the perfect
>example: sit a user down at a SYSV UNIX console, tell him (or her)
>that 'ls' is the command to list a diretory, watch him type it and see
>the single-column list scroll off the screen, and you've lost one to
>VMS.  He'll leave the room, shaking his head.  I've seen it happen.

Although I agree with the sentiment I find it amusing that my first
memories of VMS were that I typed DIR and it spun past my screen,
there was no piping so no more (I suppose in the last 10 years they've
hacked something in somewhere.) I walked out of the room shaking my
head...

Anyhow, I do think a lot of these discussions devolve into these
fairly subjective claims of what a user interface should look like and
what's good and bad about Unix. Little or no counter examples are ever
offered. It always seems to be Unix against "the as yet undefined".

I do know that AT&T has had a fair amount of success in other
endeavors asking people to type in long strings of digits to contact
their friends and business associates, there's probably more to user
interfaces than meets the eye. I've found (informally) that a person's
ability to adapt to a device is highly correlated with their
motivation to make use of it. You can make an interface a lot more
friendly by giving the employee involved a significant raise in pay.

It would be nice if people would perhaps rise above this hot-rod
mentality and try to provide balanced examples and maybe even some
reputable research from the human factors engineering or similar
fields, even just some metrics and hypotheses statement would help a
lot (user-friendly?  to whom? Our administrators? scientists?
students? small warm-blooded animals of unspecified lineage?)

Otherwise it just sounds like so much boy's-night-out bar-babble.
My ls is bigger than your ls, indeed (oops, that's an old joke.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University