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Re: Documentation Standards was Re: [ox-en] UserLinux



Hi Ben


A rather incoherent reply from me - I'm arguing with myself!

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Benj. Mako Hill wrote:

On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 11:48:16AM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Martin Hardie wrote:

For soemone like em having the source code is next to useless. What
I need is knowledge.  So as someone who has started using FLOSS in
the last year or so and is not a techie I soemtimes find
instructions and even books (eg Running Linux) a little bit
difficult.

I think you're conflating things. This is a different (but no less
important) problem. This is the "GNU/Linux is too hard" problem.

This second problem is easier to deal with. FOSS *will* get easier to
use. Linux was announced only 12 years ago and we've made leaps and
bounds since then. A decade ago, I used an operating system without a
graphical user interface. In the proprietary world, Windows 3.1 was in
use and Windows 95 was just around the corner. We've come a long way
in terms catching up in the last decade and users without a lot of
technical uses are able to use GNU/Linux for a limited set of
things. As time progresses, this set of things will increase. We've
got KDE, GNOME, Nautalis, Evolution, Mozilla, Konquerer, Openoffice,
and the number is increasing.


I find I'm stuck on the oppsite side of this problem. As someone who got
used to computers before Windows, I found (and still find) Windows
horrible to use - the attitude that 'users should just know what sequence
of buttons to press' leaves me feeling completely frustrated every time
soemthing doesn't work. Now people are saying it's a great success that we
have OpenOffice - and when I try to use it I find it does exactly what
Word does for me: randomly swap fonts or styles, refuses to let me
determine which parts of a paragraph are in or not in bulleted lists, etc.
and gives me no control at all.  When people in the past talked about
'linux taking over the world' I didn't understand that they meant 'linux
will clone windows'. At least, it appears that most do, leaving a few
retro grumpy old men to stick with their plain window managers, TeX, and
command lines...

My hope before was that a new way of writing programs - the <irony>'free
software way'</irony> - would lead to a new kind of program that would
also have a new way of being used, a way that involved the user in a
community where there was no strict user/creator division. This would mean
much more work for users at the start, but much less frustration for users
in the medium term.

Now I wonder whether all this was, was just me feeling 'if I can force the 
world to use unix then I won't have to learn a new OS'.

But for some people it seems they think it's a major advance when 
employees use OpenOffice in place of Word - in exactly the same way. And
even if I was wrong before, I still don't get why people feel this is 
and kind of improvement for users (with the one exception that it is 
possible to generate output data in a transparent format, which is not
in itself of immediate benefit to most users).


The hacker republic problem is tricky. Guido von Rossum has said that
*everyone* who uses a computer should learn a programming language. I
used to think that was totally off base but over time I've come to
reflect on how much better the computer using world would be if this
were the case. :)

What we need to do first is figure out if software is more like
reading (the idea of teaching a society to read but *not* to write is
horrifying) or more like building a car (not everyone needs to know
how to build a car although even though it might be nice).

As a car driver, I've never felt the need to build a car from scratch.
I have, however, often needed to get one going when it's died on me or
when I can't afford to pay someone else to do a minor repair. There's
a difference between knowing enough of something that's not your main
interest to get by, and being an expert; and no-one can be an expert in
everything.

The problem with this is the general trend to remove access to any 
functionality in the name of user friendliness. If the price of having a 
user-friendly car that tells me aloud to put my seat belt on is to have
an engine that's a sealed mass of electronics labelled 'do not touch'
I would rather go without the user-friendliness. As I wrote above, I'm
starting to realise this isn't a common attitude.

   happening. Prolog is more accessible than PHP is more accessible
   than Perl is more accessible than C is more accessible than
   Fortran.

gulp... in which universe? If you really believe C is more accessible than
(modern) Fortran you've been writing too much C lately ;-) I don't believe
this kind of scale has any meaning beyond the individual. Each of the 
above has a specific area of application, in which they are the most
accessible language.



 - FOSS! Once we all have languages that make programming easy

To stick with the analogy from one of the other mails in this thread,
programming is rather like book writing. It takes the same kind of
strategic, large-scale planning, combined with making sure a mass
of little details stay coherent. There is no natural language that makes
writing a book easy, why should there be a programming language that makes
writing programs easy? A programming language that's easy to learn, sure -
but that's not the same thing, any more than the fact that Esperanto is
easy to learn makes writing books in Esperanto child's play.

Regards
Graham

_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/



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