On 28/02/2016 14:03, Rustom Mody wrote:
On Sunday, February 28, 2016 at 7:22:08 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
Rustom Mody :
whereas in fact every significant GUI embeds text (possibly recursively)
eg TI inside GUI -- think of text inside gimp
GUI inside TI -- think of Word embedding other doc types including pictures
Which can be recursive -- WOrd embeds a picture embeds text
Sigh, still nobody has mentioned an exemplary GUI application.
An anecdote: Some weeks back my son and I were struggling to get the
right kind of graph out of Excel. After four hours of Google, Youtube,
trial and error, we gave up, took out a pad of millimeter paper and some
colored pencils. The whole job took my son an hour and the end result
looked great. He snapped a picture and sent it to the teacher by email.
Point being??
If I tried to speak Finnish I'd look a fool.
Makes me a fool?
Best I can see you dont know excel [Nor do I]
Lets guess that you've spent 10 hours struggling with excel
Now compare with how much with programming and 'classical' CS
Would a couple of thousand hours be an overestimate?
Is the inherent difficulty of excel to programming consistent with that ratio?
Some programs are just difficult to use. Yes maybe you can achieve
something with enough knowledge and training, but then you're getting
the result despite the obstacles put in your way rather than because the
software is so helpful.
20 years ago, when these things were simpler, MS Word had a mind of its
own even then. I had to produce a manual of few hundred pages, with
diagrams and images, and it just wasn't going to happen. Not without
spending a year on it. And employing someone to do it cost thousands.
In the end I spent a week or two throwing together some simple mark-up
language, written in my own editor, which was then processed by my own
script language and ending up (via my own graphics software along the
way) as Postscript. The results were perfect.
(Have you ever had a situation where you have to edit a bit of text
where a word is in italic or has some particular style. You delete the
word, and try and add some more text, but it persists in using the style
of the deleted text rather than the current style. You move further
away; still the same. You end up deleting everything including every
trace of that word and its style. Yet start typing on a now blank
document, and it's still the wrong style!
That's what I mean by these applications having minds of their own. And
with a 300-page document you can't just start all over, you need
something reliable, and not so smart.)
--
Bartc
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