Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

First off, error messages can always be improved, and I bet the program
maintainers would be happy to accept patches, so long as those patches
don't *decrease* the amount of information available.

But in one area you're dead wrong:

On 05-Aug-03, 11:55 (CDT), Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote: 
> Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude. The number of
> future debian users is *significantly* larger than the number of existing
> users, unless something drastic happens to either humanity or debian
> itself. Why should everyone who will use debian in future be forced to
> learn archaic commands, paths, and deal with other historical holdbacks,
> instead of the few who already use it being taught easier conventions?

Without meaning offense, that's a very selfish attitude. You want to
ruin a system that provide incredible productivity and ease-of-use for
the experienced user, for the sake of some hypothetical users who might
be better served by another OS?

You see, a great many of us (not just Debian users, but Unix users in
general) have learned what those "archaic" commands and paths are, and
their very shortness increases usability -- not "learnability" perhaps,
but actual usuability, for those who use it every day. Combine that
with the fact that they are the same[1] from system to system, and
any changes are a complete detriment to usability. To you, 'list' may
look better than 'ls', but for someone who types it several hundred
times a week, and is *far* more likely to mis-type 'list', 'ls' is
completely superior. Compare 'ls -ltr' with the VMS equivalent[2]
'directory/sort=date/order=reverse'. Yes, the latter is easier to read
*IF* you don't know either. But which would you rather type?

Which should keep you (or whoever wants to do it) from building a shell
that provides more english like commands. But please don't ruin the
system for the rest of us.

> [Re: UI designers] Unfortunately we don't seem to have many of those
> in the free software community.

Now *that* is a true statement.

Steve

[1] The existing variations are painful enough. Let's not add to the problem

[2] Yes, I know that's probably not the actual VMS command. It's been a
while, and I don't have manual handy. But it's close enough to get the
flavor of it.

-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net