At 3:26 PM -0500 1/12/03, John Siracusa wrote: >On 1/12/03 3:04 PM, Heather Madrone wrote: > > I feel a little antiquated on this forum, using perl under emacs and >> installing my CPAN modules one at a time by hand, but, hey, it >> works. > >You're illustrating part of the problem though. The users who understand >how to fix things when they go wrong are the same users that probably won't >use Fink in the first place (I also do everything "by hand"). The users who >don't have as much experience with Unix will likely be drawn to Fink, and >then will not be able to diagnose and fix problems when they happen. Making >Unix user-friendly is hard... :)
You just have to approach it the right way. Unix is perfectly friendly once you get to know it. It has all those man pages, after all. (And perl is self-documenting....) >From a coding perspective, I find these modern systems with their layers of modules and class libraries harder to use than the basic, extremely buggy tools I have been using for millennia. There are so many more layers and dependencies in these modern systems. It's a wonder they ever work at all. I do use perl modules when they exist, but I only use the ones that I need. No point in making things more complicated than they absolutely have to be. The fewer mysterious black boxes I have to understand, the better. And I can't see the point of fink. It didn't strike me as all that useful, just another gronky system to have to learn to use. Unlike emacs, which is perfectly intuitive as long as your brain is programmed in lisp. -- Heather Madrone ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.madrone.com Reality: deeper than I dreamed.
