Re: More 5.8.0 / Jaguar / Fink madness

[Puneet Kishor]

On Sunday, January 12, 2003, at 04:18  PM, Heather Madrone wrote:

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.

well, that's the catch-22, right? "once you get to know it". The problem is there is a huge majority of folks (includes me) who are still getting to know it. We have discovered the wonderful things that can be done with these tools, and now we are trying to apply them to our problems. But we are discovering rapidly that we have to first spend a lot of time "getting to know" these tools. Nothing wrong with due diligence and all that, but there has to be some meeting of the sides.

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.

yes, it is a wonder, isn't it. And yet they do. My car is a modern marvel, and it works without me having to understand how the internal combustion engine works. And that is just the basics. I am sure it has more circuitry in it than most factories of yesterday. But it works. So is my Mac a modern marvel. I have no clue how Obj-C works, or had no clue how Turbo Pascal worked. Or how a hard-drive encoded data, etc. But I have always been able to do my work with my Mac.

I guess the key is what are we coding. From your coding perspective, perhaps, the extra layers are understandably a baggage. Since I may not be coding at that low a level, from my perspective just querying a database, creating an output file, regexping a string, manipulating a time format, sorting a resorting an array... hey, that is enough. I love using a high-level, layer-infested, Aqua-wrapped, TCP/IP plumbed, syntax highlighting, mouse responding editor to do my coding, and an equally burdened browser to grok my results. I am glad for all that extra layer.

be.  The fewer mysterious black boxes I have to understand, the better.

sure, and I respect that. But, it takes all kinds to make this world. I like blackboxes precisely because I don't have to understand them. Then I can use my finite attention span on other problems. Imagine if everytime I had to paint in Photoshop I had to first understand the physics of RGB and the math of kernel convolutions. I would never get anywhere in my work.

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.

Although I have very limited experience with Fink, and I don't use it yet, I think Fink is great. Kudos to those who are working on it. We need something like this because a majority of users will want to install stuff that Fink lets them, but not want to know a LC_ALL = (unset) from a _dyld.

Fink will mature and/or morph into something else and one day some of us will wonder how we ever did without it. Just like an incredibly complicated thing called the internet now just works.

As John said, making Unix user-friendly _is_ hard. Thankfully Apple is doing a darned good job doing just that.