On Thu, 2 Aug 2007, Tiger12506 wrote: > But they have provided Microsoft with much money because more useless > people can use computers.
That's a little harsh, isn't it? A person using a computer is not useless by virtue of not wanting to program or understand technical details, but rather just wanting to use it for its functional purpose. There are people in my Finance department who know much more about finance than I do, and more, I suspect, than you do. They are very useful to me and my employer by virtue of that knowledge, and if some of them don't know about Microsoft Windows file extension, well, quite frankly, who cares? They know what's important. I don't want to have to know the details of what makes my car run. All I want to do is drive it from one location to another. > It is because these people do not wish to learn, do not have the > capacity, Why should they have to learn? They just want to use the spreadsheet, for example. Why should they have to learn that the magic sequence of ".XLS", when appended to a file name, make the file work a certain way? In most contexts, the name of a thing does not determine how it works. The name is just a name. I suppose I could have a television that would require me to know to tune it to a frequency of about 69Mhz to watch a particular program; but it's just so much more convenient to me to turn to channel 4. I see that hiding of the technical details as an improvement, not a hindrance. Why should people adapt themselves to software instead of having the software adapt to them? I'm cribbing a bit from George Bernard Shaw here, who wrote something like, "The reasonable man adapts to the world; the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
