From: ewright@convex.com (Edward V. Wright)
Subject: Re: More Defense of CLI (there, I changed the subject ... )
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 17:48:53 GMT
Organization: Engineering, CONVEX Computer Corp., Richardson, Tx., USA
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by a user at CONVEX Computer
              Corp. The opinions expressed are those of the user and
              not necessarily those of CONVEX.

In <1992Oct15.204843.11547@nwnexus.WA.COM> kanefsky@halcyon.com (Steve Kanefsky) writes:

>>Am I missing something here?

>Dunno.  I think I've shown that a GUI is not inherently more or less
>consistent than a CLI.  

No, no, no.  All you showed was that the Macintosh interface was not
*perfectly* consistent.  You did not show that it was as inconsistent
as any CLI -- not within an order of magnitude.

>Apple has shown an ability to come up with a
>consistent interface.  I'd like them to use that ability to come up with
>a consistent command-line Mac interface

A double oxymoron.  No command-line interface can be consistent.  And if 
it's a CLI, it's not a Mac interface.

>(which they are, in fact, doing)

Oh?  Perhaps you should leak this revelation to the rest of the world.
MacWeek would pay good money for secret information like this.

>because a command-line interface has some advantages over a graphical
>interface in some areas.  

Bullpuckey.

>These advantages/disadvantages are completely independent of consistency.  
>got it now?

Yes.  You're deluded.



>>And if you're really a "fan" of the Macintosh interface, why do you
>>slime it by using derogatory terms like "Gooey" for it?

>Be careful, you're really coming across like a fanatic here.  

But you claimed you were a Macintosh fanatic yourself.  (Look up the
word "fan" in the dictionary.)

>Since when is "Graphical User Interface" a derogatory term?  

Since the day it was created.  That term was created to slime
the Macintosh interface by lumping it with MS Windows, X, and
all the other "Gooeys."

>I simply used an abbreviation for that term:  "GUI."  I have never, 
>ever, used the term "Gooey." 

Same term, different spelling.  "Gooey" is how it's pronounced.

It's okay, though.  I expect this from a fan of CLUNK (Command
Line Under Normal Komputing) machines.


>And if you can't do something at all, it's infinitely difficult, right?
>Since you can't do some things with the Mac GUI that you can do with
>some CLI's, those things are infinitely easier to do with a CLI.

Since pigs can fly, they have wings.

>I've had about equal experience (8 years worth) with UNIX and the Mac.
>Do you really think I'd be completely blind to the fact that I'm less
>efficient with UNIX if that were the case?

I don't know.  Are you?


>No, I'm talking about access controls in the more traditional sense.
>This is an application to model the entire Boeing 777 aircraft, with
>hundreds of people entering data and hundreds of thousdands of objects.
>We can't have Joe Blow deleting the entire aircraft from the database,
>can we now :-)  We wanted Joe to *know* that delete was unavailable to
>him by greying it out.  

Well, if it's the *object* that the user doesn't have access to,
rather than the tool (which is what I thought you said the first
time), why not do the logical thing and grey out the *object*?

>On the other hand, if the currently-selected
>object was a signal, we didn't even want a tool like "simulate" to show
>up in the menu because it simply doesn't make sense to simulate a
>signal.  

Well, it makes perfect sense to me, but never mind.  I'll take
your word that it doesn't make sense in the context of the program.
But graying out "simulate" would have conveyed the same information
to the user, without rearranging other menu items so he couldn't
find them.

>Even a toolbox would still have been cluttered by all the tools.  

Popup "drawers" within the toolbox...

>One of the key aspects of this system was
>that a system administrator could use it and have a completely different
>view of things than the average user who just needed to enter some data.
>The average user didn't even want to know that tools for system
>administration existed.  

So why should you add them to his program?  One-size-fits-all
software is the wave of the past....



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