Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[Sergei Steshenko]

--- On Sat, 12/8/12, Freddy López <address@hidden> wrote:

From: Freddy López <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Woctave-another gui front end
To: "Sergei Steshenko" <address@hidden>
Cc: "Søren Hauberg" <address@hidden>, "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
Date: Saturday, December 8, 2012, 12:02 PM
[snip]
Yes, Sergei, you are a god.
[snip]

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Huh ?

The chips I took part designing had specs 200 .. 300 pages long.

PCIExpress spec, IIRC, is 700+ pages long.

Engineers in order just to start going in chip design need to read two or more 
specs. So, using the numbers above, first about 1000 pages if documentation 
need to be read.


There are _objective_ requirements for certain occupations. Ability and 
willingness to read and understand documentation is a prerequisite for chip 
designers and other engineers.


By the way, reading PCIExpress standard as PDF file I came across some 
omissions - some terms were use, but not defined in the document. I happened to 
be the pieces were defined in PCI (not Express) documentation, so it's natural 
the omissions were made.

Because the same group of people was behind both standards. Since I didn't know 
PCI standard, I found the omissions.

...

Year 2003 C++ standard is 756 pages long, and year 2011 C++ standard is even 
longer since new features have been added.

...

Unwillingness to read documentation is refusal to obtain the necessary 
knowledge already obtained and written by others.

...

As I read somewhere, sticking just with GUI is like perceiving the world as 
pictures (children up to age of 4..5) and not learning to write.

Surprisingly, navigating through (file) menus is often slower than doing the 
same in command line, especially taking into account that in command line one 
can easily do things like

ls *foo*.m (dir *foo*.m)
find . -name "*foo*.m" -follow -print

- typical file manager widget doesn't have these features.

Also, tab completion in shells ( 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_completion ) is quite helpful/useful.

...

One has to understand that a strange ecosystem has been created and is 
sustained, the ecosystem consists of:

1) people who do not know command line;
2) people who say that command line is arcane, thus supporting ignorance of 
people in 1);
3) programmers writing GUI (often for money - in commercial companies) for 
people in 1).


Everybody in the ecosystem seems to be satisfied ( people in 1) have the GUI, 
people in 2) have audience, people in 3) have income or, at least, publicity), 
just the resources are squandered and efficiency suffers.



Regards,
  Sergei.