Eric Newcomer wrote:
> The purpose of software is to allow humans to tell computers what to do,
> since computers are basically stupid collections of ones and zeroes that
> need to be explicitly manipulated and interpreted. The history of the
> software industry can be characterized, at least in part if not mainly,
> as an continued effort to improve the level of abstraction at which a
> human can tell a computer what to do.
Which abstraction has prevailed for the general users? Objects, or procedures?
Objects have prevailed in the user interface. The GUI interface with icons is
all about objects. Context menus are object oriented "method" mechanisms. The
users hate when they have to know which program to open and then find the file
to load into it. That's the procedural paradigm, and it requires too much
contextual knowledge.
The MS context menu, lets you define "actions" for a particular file type
(using
extension for the desktop and mime-type for web accessed data). Then through
the context menu, you can invoke one or more of these actions. Typically there
is an "Open" action by default. I have defined extra actions for .xml so that
I
can right click and say "build" it it's an ANT build.xml file. There are other
similar things that I've done for other file types.
I love the power of a command line in unix, because I can control all the
specifics. But, in the end, objects one. The icon strewn desktop is the
object
oriented environment that everyone is used to, and has made the most sense.
Otherwise, we'd have commands all over the desktop, and we'd be dropping data
on
them, and then little bits would fall out on the desktop as results...
Gregg Wonderly
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