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From: hwe@beta.UUCP (Skip Egdorf)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: User interfaces (was: Large programs)
Message-ID: <11120@beta.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 13-Oct-87 15:46:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: beta.11120
Posted: Tue Oct 13 15:46:29 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Oct-87 02:09:37 EDT
References: <1046@ius1.cs.cmu.edu> <1130@gilsys.UUCP> <10908@beta.UUCP> <7607@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 84
Keywords: UNIX LS

In article <7607@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>, stpeters@dawn.steinmetz (Dick St.Peters) writes:
> In article <11050@beta.UUCP> hwe@beta.UUCP (Skip Egdorf) writes:
> >Please re-read my posting. I claimed that the Unix philosophy was to
> >provide the (few) wizards with the profiling tools and the interface ...
> 
> My apologies if I've misread you.  Perhaps I've seen too many others
> lambasting what you describe, calling it "creaping featurism".
> (Which, incidently, is a real disease, but not as prevalent as some
> would have us believe.)

Exactely! The creeping featurism is (I believe) the tendency of the
developers to include some features that seem "good", but that are
not really driven by the requirements of the users.

> However, I'm not at all convinced that profiling usage is a good guide
> to user-interface evolution.  Unless it heavily weights usage by naive
> and infrequent users, it will cause an interface tuned for experts.
> If it does give naive user usage more weight, it could drive out those
> things that make a good interface for experts.

It is probably true that the profiling tools that allowed grep to be
derived from ed usage, or that allow a much used shell script to be
identified and recoded in C are not enough to derive user interface
requirements for todays tools. I am not sure what such tools might look
like. I do know that a) including "Features" for the sake of including
"features" is not the thing to do (look at the 4.2 cat command for the
canonical example), and b) making the program very wordy are not the
correct things to do.

> What I want to see is interfaces that are, most of all, *flexible*,
> with the versatility and power needed by wizards and which, if not
> intrinsically simple, can be adapted (by experts) for novices.
> Fortunately, this is exactly what I see happening.

I agree that the two main groups of users will include wizards and novices.
I don't really think that the general trend is toward including both the
flexability and the generality. Throwing out the ability to pipe the
output of one tool into another is a step in the wrong direction. None the
less, I like ls to put things into multiple cols. Now if I could just
remember the switch that turns that format off...
The problem bites both novice and wizard alike. The point is the if
the wizards want the feature turned off and the novices want it on, and
it is hard to do either, something is missing.

> What I don't like to see is having this evolution denounced by purists
> as violating the original spirit of a lean (and mean) interface.  The
> people denouncing multi-column 'ls' are those most able, by dint of
> expertise, to surmount a behavior they find intrusive.  The novice has
> no idea what to do when his listing scrolls off the screen.

I don't want to return to a Silent-700 in 1977. I don't want to return
to paper tape and an ASR33 in 1967. The single thing that makes the
Unix history relevant is that for a brief time in the mid-70s, user interface
design was driven by the user requirements rather than the wizards guesses.

> 
> Even worse is when 'man' is not piped to 'more' automatically.
> 
> >There is light on the horizon. Try X Windows on a VAXStation. Try playing
> >with windows on a Apollo. Play with NeWS or Sunview on a Sun.
> 
> Sounds like you think I must be a novice because I stood up in their
> defense.

Sorry for any unintentional slight. This is a hard problem that should
be solved by interface designers but will probably be resolved (rather
than solved) by marketeers.

> 
> I agree the horizon looks dazzling.  I didn't choose "dawn" as my
> hostname for nothing.
> --
> Dick St.Peters                        
> GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY
> stpeters@ge-crd.arpa              
> uunet!steinmetz!stpeters

					Skip Egdorf
					hwe@lanl.gov

By the way Dick, thanks for the idea about switching between NeWS and
Sunview on the 3/110. This is being written on a 3/110 on my desk, and
I hadn't used it that way (yet).
					Skip