How Come Ruby is Text-Oriented?

[David Masover]

As far as UIs are concerned, I actually think that the smarter the UI
the better.

I couldn't disagree more.

You could say "the easier the UI the better", but when UIs start getting
"smart", they inevitably lose precision. The dumber the UI the better.

An example of a better, simpler UI might be automatic transmission -- nobody
really cares what gear you're in, you care how fast you're going, and how fast
you're accelerating.

An example of a smarter, but really worse UI might be if you removed the
steering wheel and put in a voice-activated, GPS-guided system. Ok, great,
until you say "Go to Chili's" and it hears "Go to Chilie", and starts driving
to South America. A dumber interface is better -- if the GPS steers you wrong,
at least you're still the one who's actually holding the steering wheel.

This is why I believe the "commandline" will one day fail -
like the day when we have really awesome hardware AND software.

We do now, and the commandline hasn't failed.

One of the main reasons for that is that it's so much more powerful than any
GUI that's been developed, in a few ways. One example: Unix pipes. Through
this simple mechanism, I can join programs together in ways they weren't
designed to -- the traditional example is tar and compress. Not only does this
mean that tar doesn't have to know about compression (though modern versions
usually do), it also means it's trivial to swap one compression algorithm for
another -- I can just use 'tar | bzip2' instead of 'tar | gzip'.

GUIs just haven't reached anywhere near even that simple power -- another
obvious example is piping the output of anything through grep. Wouldn't it be
nice if all GUIs supported searching? In practice, many do, but each app has
to implement it separately, and each search works a little differently.
Contrast this to having one program that does one thing, and does it well
(grep) which can be swapped for any other search program at any point.

Now, it may get to where the commandline is a lost art, but I just don't see
it being replaced, unless you've managed to come up with a GUI that can do the
same things -- and, more importantly, do them at least as fast.

 

[Tom Morris]

Seems to me, you're using the wrong window manager

On OS X and Windows, I use what comes out of the box. Admittedly, on OS
X, I've installed a whole bunch of stuff to make it so I don't have to
mouse much (Vimperator, Google QSB, and a plugin so I can resize and
move windows around using keyboard shortcuts). I mostly use my Linux box
only by SSHing in from my OS X machine. I've got GNOME on there by
default. I've tried wmii, awesome and a few other minimalist,
keyboard-oriented WMs and they often require a lot of effort, or various
applications just break in jarring ways. My fanaticism for
keyboard-driven computing is only exceeded by my laziness.

 

[Robert Dober]

Wrong. It's the old farts of the "Acad=C3=A9mie Fran=C3=A7aise" who consi= der that
adopting words freely is a "corruption" and that using English words hurt= s
the "graphie" of the French language (I kid you not), while the rest of t= he
population will happily use whatever sounds the best or the coolest or he= lps
making any message the most clear. And since the aforementioned senile
fucktards are the ones who decide what goes in the French dictionary or n= ot
they actually have to be forced by the overwhelming popular usage first,
which takes time. That's why

I do not agree, the French have much more of a defense mechanisme (
but you see I pollute the English with French words, something which
has happened for a long time period anyway) than any other language
community I have met before (that is three, German, Italian and
Spanish). Know you might think bad of the Acad=C3=A9mie Fran=C3=A7aise, I a=
nd
most people I know of my age do not. I just recently complained to a
much younger colleague that I never knew how to pronounce email in
French (or club, or rugby or Burt Lancester) and he simply pointed out
that courriel is a beautiful word. I agree.

But I am aware, well aware, that for some folks label all those who
are of a different opinion with nice expressions of which you make
ample use above.

Cheers
Robert

--=20
module Kernel
alias_method :=CE=BB, :lambda
end

 

[Fabian Streitel]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

On OS X and Windows, I use what comes out of the box. Admittedly, on OS
X, I've installed a whole bunch of stuff to make it so I don't have to
mouse much (Vimperator, Google QSB, and a plugin so I can resize and
move windows around using keyboard shortcuts). I mostly use my Linux box
only by SSHing in from my OS X machine. I've got GNOME on there by
default. I've tried wmii, awesome and a few other minimalist,
keyboard-oriented WMs and they often require a lot of effort, or various
applications just break in jarring ways. My fanaticism for
keyboard-driven computing is only exceeded by my laziness.

Almost the same here. Tiling window managers under windows suck (especially
when you have to have that ugly windows console open, which refuses to size
to
any usable proportion). Only I stuck with wmii. I quite like their
philosophy.
Although I'll have to switch soon, when I get a second monitor, hehe. Too
bad they
don't support that...
The apps breaking are minimal on my setup, only the occasional java gui
freaking out
but you can't blame the window manager for that...
I found that the comfort, rapidness (is that even a word?) and accessibility
of a tiling
window manager outweighs all it's problems. I repeatedly find myself hitting
Win-3 when
working under Windows, trying to get the window manager to jump to my
Vimperator
or Win-S trying to maximize a window...

Greetz!

 

[Lars Haugseth]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

On OS X and Windows, I use what comes out of the box. Admittedly, on
OS X, I've installed a whole bunch of stuff to make it so I don't
have to mouse much (Vimperator, Google QSB, and a plugin so I can
resize and move windows around using keyboard shortcuts). I mostly
use my Linux box only by SSHing in from my OS X machine. I've got
GNOME on there by default. I've tried wmii, awesome and a few other
minimalist, keyboard-oriented WMs and they often require a lot of
effort, or various applications just break in jarring ways. My
fanaticism for keyboard-driven computing is only exceeded by my
laziness.

Almost the same here. Tiling window managers under windows suck
(especially when you have to have that ugly windows console open,
which refuses to size to any usable proportion). Only I stuck with
wmii. I quite like their philosophy. Although I'll have to switch
soon, when I get a second monitor, hehe. Too bad they don't support
that... The apps breaking are minimal on my setup, only the
occasional java gui freaking out but you can't blame the window
manager for that... I found that the comfort, rapidness (is that even
a word?) and accessibility of a tiling window manager outweighs all
it's problems. I repeatedly find myself hitting Win-3 when working
under Windows, trying to get the window manager to jump to my
Vimperator or Win-S trying to maximize a window...

In Linux I setup 12 workspaces, and switch between them using keys
Ctrl+F1 through Ctrl+F12. Most apps I use have a dedicated and
specific workspace, so I always know what shortcut to press to get
to a specific app. Combined with a dual monitor setup for when I
need to have two apps visible simultaneously to be productive.