At 20:28 27/11/2001 -0500, dman wrote:
A GUI can do the things the designer thought of quite easily, but they can't do anything else easily. Pipes and filters allow fairly simple programs to be combined to perform complex and unique operations quite easily, once the learning curve of the utilities is overcome. (BTW I have a fair amount of experience in developing GUI apps)
Agreed, of course. Winzip and Notepad weren't made to extract the names of the classes from a Jar file, and a command line with more general commands would do the work much more easily. But what if there was a Graphical Interface for this specific task? What if you could press a button, select a file and receive the desired report formatted on your favorite font, ready to print out? I know it's exaggerated, but it's just an example.
New and uncommon tasks (like the one your Boss asked you) are command line tasks. Everyday stuff is for X. Whatever we develop, we have to make it stable and as bugless as possible first, but then we have to think about user-friendliness too. If Linux were more user-friendly, people wouldn't still be stuck on Windows. Again, that's what I think...
Peace,
- Vítor
______________________
Vítor Estêvão Silva Souza
vitor.souza@terra.com.br