unix too hard

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From: "Brian K. White" <linut@squonk.net>
Subject: Re: UNIX as a Hobbie
References: <urif5cWfAHA.278@cpmsnbbsa07> <slrn961q9u.9bo.jonLUNCHEON@olethros.apeiros.com> <3A61A1E5.45A79819@aplawrence.com> <93sik1$dh9$1@hobbes.caldera.com> 
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 07:32:00 GMT

"J. L. Schilling" wrote:
> 
> Tony Lawrence (tony@aplawrence.com) wrote:
> 
> : Absolutely- the most seriously brain dead, dumb as a stump,
> : completely unbelievable moron I ever had the displeasure to work
> : with had at least one Phd, and I think a few other degrees,
> : several patents to his name, and had been MIS director for some
> : very impressive corporate names.  Yet, while trying to help him
> : track down a problem on the phone, we had gone through multiple
> : incantations of me saying "see-dee-SPACE-slash-you-ess-are-slash"
> : thingies.  After the 5th or sixth I left out the SPACE, and he
> : obediently didn't type it, of course got an error, and chastised
> : me for not giving proper directions.  [...]
> 
> Didn't know this person or this circumstance, obviously, but in
> general the conclusion I draw from stories like this is how
> unfriendly the UNIX command line interface is.  Commands are cryptic
> ("cd" sounds like something that plays music); spellings leave out
> letters (what's wrong with "/user"? "copy"?); pathnames don't
> differentiate between device names, directory names, and file names;
> case is sensitive; recalling and editing previous commands is hard or
> impossible for beginners; and so on.

the fact that all directories, drives, & devices just look like the same
kind of path is *good*

the fact that case is sensative is *good*

the fact that there are zillions of "cryptic" commands with zillions of
"cryptic" options available is *good*

complaining about all this excellent consistancy and wide open flexability
which is what makes anything imaginable acheivable because its "hard to
learn" is like being bill gates and complaining that he can't get by with
a nice simple checking account anymore because he has too many billions.

I'm not sympathetic to that. I'm sympathetic to the extent that I'll agree
with someone that yep, theres a noticeable learning curve to overcome, but
isn't that so with any endeavor in the world? At least any worth doing?
and I'll help a guy figure it all out who wants to, and I'll help anyone
else realise that it's ok if your not the sysadmin, just like it's ok that
I'm not the lawyer. I have no patience at all for the notion that unix
should be both ultimately flexable and powerful and at the same time
magically safe for any clod to walk up and poke their finger into the
works and be safe from doing harm. You can't have it both ways. easy, or
capable. any muddy mid-way point I don't even want to *think* about (NT)

having user-firendl apps on unix is fine, including X and all the gui
apps. Even some of the gui sysadmin utils, *if* they are thorough, and can
be relied upon not to ever make anything worse that can't also be undon
just as easily from the same gui util. a lot of these things seem to have
a habit of being capable a messing something up that can only be fixed the
old-fashioned way.

there is still user-interface efficiency progress I guess though. I pretty
much like a lot of what the enhancements to the shell and other utilities
in gnu stuff. like the arrow-keys in bash and less, various fancy new
options to supporting utils, like tar being able to compress/decompress
with gzip and bzip2 without having to construct a pipe.. though in that
particular case... I don't beleive in removing pipes by building things
into utils, like the way some msdos commands have a pager built in. in the
case of gnu tar, gzip is not built-in, merely the ability to recognize the
file type and call the external compressor if available.

I don't think unix has to make any apologies or concessions. Anything you
do to it to dumb it down now would be a crying shame of a set-back.

-- 
Brian K. White                   http://www.squonk.net/users/linut
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