From: jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Organization: Mount Holyoke College
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 02:59:26 GMT

In article <os86ft8@fido.asd.sgi.com> cj@sgi.com (C J Silverio) writes:
>In article <1992Aug19.192513.28287@news.eng.convex.com>, Tom Christiansen <tchrist@convex.COM> writes:
>|Of how much ultimate utility is that nifty new spreadsheet, editor, or
>|debugger if I can't dialup from the field and run it on my vt100?  Too
>
>My response to this argument is a big "So what?"
>
>I do not consider troff to be of more utility than FrameMaker or
>Microsoft Word, even though I can use troff from a vt100.

I consider TeX to be of greater utility than either FrameMaker or
MS Word for many applications, and I can use it from a vt100.

>I do not consider dbx to be of more utility than CASE tools with
>GUIs, even though I can use dbx from a vt100.

GNU's "gdb" blows away the admittedly very nice GUI debugger in
THINK C (which I like and have used heavily).  gdb can be used
via a command line interface (from a vt100 or otherwise), via
a screen-oriented interface in emacs (from a vt100 or otherwise),
and via a GUI (xxgdb -- not from a vt100).

>I do not consider pic to be of more utility than CAD & drawing
>software, even though I can use pic from a vt100.

True.  8-)

>I don't even consider vi to be of more utility than the
>GUI-based text editor I'm using to write this article, even
>though I can use vi from a vt100.  This editor has all the
>features vi has, accessible from menus or from keyboard
>equivalents.  And it lets me cut & paste text with my mouse,
>which is much much faster & more convenient than vi's
>mechanism.

Actually, I am certain that someone who is rally good with vi can
perform most editing operations much faster than you can in your
gooish editor.  I don't use or like vi myself... I use emacs (which I
can use from my vt100).  On my Mac I use an emacs clone named "alpha"
which has a complete GUI _and_ is completely programmable in 'Tcl'.

>You'd have a much stronger argument if you argued that some
>tasks are not suited to GUI presentations.  The examples
>I listed above *are* better off presented through GUIs than
>through text interfaces.  Your blanket argument fails to convince
>me.

You're not convinced because you are not fully aware of the power of
many modern unix tools and applications.  Sure, next to Framemaker
troff looks like a dinosaur... that's because it _is_ a dinosaur,
weighing in at about 2 decades now.  But TeX (which is now also a
decade old) is still the most powerful system for typesetting
high-quality text available.  And while I'm not advocating that
everyone should learn TeX (far from it), I could make a very powerful
argument that after two hours instruction users can turn out better
looking thesis papers (for example) using LaTeX than after the
same amount of instruction in MS Word. (This is because the more
powerful features of Word that are necessary to get a serious document
"just right" aren't very intuitive... how many casual Word users know
how to use style sheets?  Not many, here.  TeX on the other hand, in
combination with LaTeX, takes care of most of the hairy stuff for
you... it has expertise in typesetting thesis papers built in.)

I like GUIs myself, and I wouldn't want to live without them.  But I
also feel that GUIs should in most cases be fairly separable from the
actual application software.  A GUI improves many aspects of user
interaction and makes it easier for the user interface designer to
present a conceptual model of the application to the user.  Thus
programs become more intuitive and easier to learn.

But to an expert user who has an extremely detailed conceptual model
of the application in her head, a GUI often becomes a interaction
bottleneck... in many cases other types of user interfaces simply have
a much higher interaction bandwith.  And then there is the fact that
GUI-only applications simply do not integrate well into the unix
tool paradigm, which robs you of an entire layer of interaction
potential.  This is particularly a problem for system adminstrators and
system integrators for whom monolithic applications are often more 
obstacles than anything else, but the end user also loses because 
"cut & paste", for all it's convenience, just isn't a very powerful
integration paradigm.

Anyway, I agree with Tom Christianson's article whole-heartedly, and
this is coming from a person who has had a Macintosh on his desk since
1984.  There is hope, however... Tcl/tk looks very promising in that
regard, and there are some fairly nice applications popping up that use
it.  Also, Emacs 19 promises to do a lot for combining the gooish with
the unix-ish in a flexible and powerful way.  These are both examples
of achieving the best of both worlds by using embedded languages.  Maybe
that is the wave of the future.

--
Jurgen Botz                  |   Internet: JBotz@mtholyoke.edu
Academic Systems Consultant  |     Bitnet: JBotz@mhc.bitnet
Mount Holyoke College        |      Voice: (US) 413-538-2375 (daytime)
South Hadley, MA, USA        | Snail Mail: J. Botz, 01075-0629
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers