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Re: Flattened GNUstep structure?


From: Christian Edward Gruber
Subject: Re: Flattened GNUstep structure?
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 00:38:10 -0500

Hi Pascal.  I respectfully take philosophical exception to your approach
here.

Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> Make a system usable even by a fool and only a fool will use it.

This is an extremely frustrating statement for me.  Do smart people not use
toasters, or automobiles either?  The above quoted statement is the sort of
anti-human-factors nonesense that keeps smarter stronger healthier
more-robust software from becoming "main-stream" whilst pieces of total crap
become the industry standard.

One of the key benefits of NeXTSTEP in the first place was that both really
really smart people AND complete computer illiterates could use it.  My wife
after years of computer phobia became sufficiently courageous enough to
overcome her "neo-luddite" (self described) attitude, because she saw how
elegant, simple, and obvious the NeXTSTEP approach and interface was.
Meanwhile, I was able to do things with its development system that I simply
couldn't have done with my programming resources in (nearly) any other
development system.

> It  would  be  much  better  to write  some  documentation  about  the
> directory structure than  to have this discussion and  to develop some
> complicated scheme  to flatten the directory structure  and still keep
> the feature the deep structure implements.

Yes and no.  Yes, write the docs.  Of course, that's obvious.  But don't
develop a complicated scheme to flatten, develop an elegant scheme to
completely insulate the users from the deep structure OR flat structure.
And simplify the structure to the level where it achieves the objectives
elegantly and without excess confusion.  If the current system is that level
of simplification, then so be it, but the answer is not to poo-poo those who
would seek a simpler solution.

regards,
Christian.





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