Re: [tlug] command line

["Jonathan Q" <jq@example.com>]

On 7/19/2002, "ayako kato" <ayako.kato@example.com> wrote:

>there's no such thing as an "intuitive" OS. if there was one, then MS
>ain't it.

A point very well taken.  Many people (including professional journalists
who really ought to know better) routinely confuse "Works like what I spent
three years learning" with "intuitive."  Intuitive would be that which is
pretty easy for someone with no prior experience to figure out.  If you sit
my mother in front of a computer, you'll see the only part she finds
intuitive is the keyboard, and that's mostly because she already knows how
to type.
But even for a person who can't type, a keyboard is by far more intuitive
than anything else on a computer, at least for a person who is literate in
a language that uses the Roman alphabet.  Even using a mouse is something
that needs to be learned.  Until a person has seen a mouse used, she's not
very likely to look at it sitting there on the desk and think "Hey, I can
move things around on the screen and control the computer by moving this
thing around and pushing these unlabeled buttons!  Cool!"

When I started working with Cisco gear, I found IOS to be quite intuitive
because of its tab completion and context-sensitive help, plus good
uniformity of syntax (commands you aren't familiar with will usually behave
the way you would expect a Cisco IOS command to behave).  However, a person
who has not worked with things like that before would not find IOS to be
the least bit intuitive.

We don't need "intuitive" OSes nearly so much as we need intuitive people,
or better still, people who will take the time to buy a good reference
book, read it, and educate themselves.  People have been using these tools
for years and they work well.  What has fallen off tremendously in the last
couple years is the quality of the users, not the quality of the tools.

J