a principal of good user design

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Tuesday, February 21. 2006

I am quite sure this guy is talking about emacs and vi war

Similarly, I have heard people argue against a tool that they ignore based on the fact that it can do too much. Too much functionality in a tools is a problem only if unneeded or unwanted functionality somehow makes it harder to use the needed and wanted parts. I have heard people argue about the amount of memory a particular tool requires, whereas the additional memory required might represent a cost equivalent to a few hours of work at most. A favorite idea is to label a particular tool with a name suggesting what it ought to be doing, and then arguing that it is doing more than that. For instance, a text editor that is capable of automatic indentation would be accused of being a ``kitchen-sink'' tool because after all it does much more than allowing the user to just edit text.

Posted by Raj Shekhar in humour at 20:30 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Yawn!

You obviously are oblivious of the UNIX way, Its not just an Operating system, it is a way of doing things, and the shell plays a key role by providing the glue that makes it work. The UNIX methodology relies heavily on reuse of a set of tools rather than on building monolithic applications. Emacs users often miss the point.

The Unix philosophy is, write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Most computer application programs can be thought of as software tools. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The guy tries to use emacs to do everything is a good example of this. Unix is a toolbox stuffed full of these tools. The more tools you have, the more you can do.

#1 spo0nman (Homepage) on 2006-02-22 08:10 (Reply)

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