On 4/30/2010 12:24 PM, Bob W wrote:
While this is a fairly obvious troll line, I must
respectfully disagree.
Anyone who lived through (and with) the popularization of
computers among the masses must remember what it was like to
learn DOS and to be fumbling through a manual to learn the
cryptic command that one must type (without syntax errors) to
accomplish ANYTHING before the Macintosh. In contrast, upon
seeing the first Macintosh running in an Office supply store
without knowing anything at all about it, one could walk
up... grab the single button mouse (which I had never seen
before) and it was immediately OBVIOUS what one would do with it.
Click, select, drag. One could easily learn to use both
applications MacWrite and MacPaint without ever cracking a
book. It was a paradigm
changer: a computer which worked virtually as you thought it should.
My experience was different. I came from paper tape to teletype to mainframe
green screens to DOS and then to Windows and I can still remember how
difficult I found the mouse to control and how unintuitive it was to use the
interface until someone had explained it to me. It was months before I
realised how to copy a file by dragging and dropping, and during that time I
always opened a DOS box when I needed to copy a file.
I wasn't alone - I witnessed similar things in many people, experienced and
naïve computer users alike, including young children bringing no background
knowledge to it. Calling the WIMP interface intuitive was a masterpiece of
marketing, but bears no relationship to reality. One of the Star Trek films
captured it nicely when the crew came back in time to the 1980s and Scotty
tried to use the mouse as a microphone to talk to the computer.
The classic line is "The teat is the only intuitive interface,
everything else is learned".
Everybody learns things differently. For me math classes were trivial
up until about calculus, and I didn't really hit a stumbling block until
differential equations, and that may have had more to do with the
professor teaching in a style that didn't work for me.
Anyways, I don't see how anyone can have trouble with something as
obvious, simple and intuitive as high school algebra, yet I can't
remember something I've heard (without semantic content to hang it on)
to save my life. That makes learning music and spoken language nearly
impossible for me. On the other hand, I pretty much sat down, read K&R
one time through and started programming in C.
Some people like to point at arcane hieroglyphics on a display, others
are more comfortable with regular expressions.
Bob
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