Shmuel characterizes my notion that there is an ineluctable conflict between power andease of use as "a copout".
I wish it were; but here the microsoft view that choices are the enemy is often correct. Users do not ordinarily know "what they want to do" in any constructive sense. They have global ease-of-use and performance goals, functional objectives. They seldom have even a vague notion what processing strategies are in use and what effects the parameterizations/choices available to them will have on performance or resource use. These issues can be clarified in written materials, workshops, and the like; but in my erxperience many users have little patience with the need to learn how systems work. We come down to choices that can be fudged a little but not much. A system can be easy to install, or it can he highly flexible and tunable. It cannot usually be both. Here, as elsewhere, Le bon Dieu est dans le détail; but I doubt very much that Shmuel disposes of a deux es machina that bridges this dichotomy. Things can of course be made easy, on the model of those books that used to be called Calculus made easy or the like and are now called Calculus for dummies instead, which achieve their objectives by leaving the hard parts out. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
