Re: Emacs - was Re: Mail/news software
I feel compelled to respond...
On Mon, May 01, 2000 at 10:15:37PM -0500, Pat Mahoney wrote:
> Linux[1] is much more difficult (to learn anyway) yet much more
> powerful than, say, windows. The Windows philosophy is: "don't think,
> everything should be easy." With linux, you must think. The windows
> philosophy seems to rub off onto the rest of one's life (or maybe it's
> the other way around). Some people don't like to think, and windows
> encourages this.
I strongly disagree with this characterization. The difference between
Windows and Linux has nothing to do with whether people like to "think".
I think perfectly well while I'm at work in front of a NT box. The
windows approach tries to give you a helping hand to get things done.
Unfortunately, it often can't get out of it's own way and becomes more
*difficult* to use. If you apply yourself to Windows, you can learn how
to do a great many complex tasks. Unixes in general have this CLI
heritage and the idea of breaking down software into reusable chunks
that can be piped together (COM/ActiveX addresses the same idea in a
different way). CLI programs are quite useful at times, but just as
often such programs are too damn complicated for their own good. Sure
you can run it from a shell script, but first you have to figure out 500
switches and all of their arguments. The interface should be
appropriate to the task at hand. There are things to like and dislike
about any computer system. This difference with Linux is the end user
can exert some direct influence on how the system evolves. This, is the
key difference.
> Linux, on the other hand, makes and encourages you to think.
> Hopefully, this will rub off onto the rest of your life and make you a
> better person. Yes, Linux can make you a better person.
>
> Unfortunately, laziness and non-thinkers are not going anywhere.
> That's why kde and gnome and the like are important. If you don't want
> to think, you don't have to. But if you do, there's always the command
> line, waiting, beckoning. Kde and gnome will allow those people to use
> free software and still not get too frustrated. I admit to being like
> this. I don't have time to learn how to get latex to print a custom
> header for my picky english teacher when it's 1:00 a.m. and an essay's
> due tommorrow. I just want to fire up a gui/wsiwig and click on
> "headers & footers."
After using both GUI wordprocessors and LaTeX for some time, I'm riding
the fence on this one. A well designed GUI can make it easy to perform
complex tasks. The big benefit of TeX/LaTeX is it's nice typesetting
and structure (not to mention math) and it's portability. How you going
to read that Word file in ten years? There is nothing inherently better
or worse about GUI's vs. CLI. It's a matter of choosing the right tool,
and providing an appropriate interface. The king of all designs is that
which can do both (such as through shared libs). We see alot of that
with things like mpg123/xmms. Kind of a best of both worlds approach.
Make it possible to run from a CLI (or shell script), but present a
pleasant GUI interface for day-to-day ease of use. From an end user's
perspective, it doesn't have a lot to do with "thinking" vs. "not
thinking", it has to do with getting the job done.
> But I have chosen to use linux; I like the free software attitude, and I want
> to be encouraged to think. The most fun I ever had was when my brother
> and I fdisk'ed our windows partition and mke2fs'ed it. Then we broke
> the windows install CD so that no one else would ever install it from
> that CD.
>
> [1] When I say linux, I mean Debian, GNU, latex etc., etc.
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