| ??? 03/27/08 18:05 Read: times |
#152624 - It can't work "up close" Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Neil said:
Richard Erlacher said:
The reason people pay lots of $$$ for a Windows-based product is because they're too dumb, or too lazy, to learn how to use the free tools. Not at all! After all, there are plenty of free GUI-based tools, and even free tools for Windows (including SDCC, of course) You're right, of course, but there is a basic problem with a point-and-shoot GUI. see below ... In very many cases, a command line is a very cumbersome and difficult-to-use thing - it's just not the natural way that people work.
When you go into a shop, they don't insist that you quote the stock number before they'll serve you - you can just point and say, "one of those, please" A GUI models that approach. That works only if you know what it is that you want. If you go into a widget shop, never having seen a widget, you certainly won't recognize the one that you think you want. What I see, most of the time this question arises, is would-be users who haven't a clue what it is that they want, or what it is that they have to do, but they want it now and they want it for free, not so much free from cost, but free from effort. Moreover, many of them want it to read their minds, because they're unwilling to think, and, much less, do, about defining their needs. All of that involves proper documentation. Too often, there isn't any. Windows v3.1 was pretty well documented, at least to the extent that the user could figure out what to expect. Later versions lacked this feature. Further, the extensive use of the mouse tends to reduce productivity. A key that can be pressed in 200 ms, has been replaced with 5 seconds of mouse operations, since they each produce a drop-down menu, often circular, and sometimes leading nowhere you want to go. You can learn the 5 second mouse operations, under Windows, or, if you use DOS, you can simply enter a command line that invokes a batch file and be done with it. In many ways, a GUI is a far more convenient approach - and it's a convenience that's worth paying for. From what I've seen, the bulk of the effort, and therefore the cost, of a GUI-based tool set is for doing the odd 10-minutes of thinking that could normally be done by a command-line (DOS or *NIX) user to plan and script his work. If you can justify paying for someone else to do that, then I guess a commercially provided Windows program is warranted. Of course, a GUI is not suited to every task, and fear of the command-line will certainly hamper you. I've seldom achieved any useful work under Windows, a noteable exception being Windows v3.1x. Ever since Win9x came out, it has prevented me from doing necessary and useful work, so I've stuck with the old DOS to do useful work, aside from the things that Windows does handle well, such as internet comm's, and what MSOffice provides. As ever, it's a case of knowing all the options - and picking the most suitable one to the specific task at hand. Of that, there can be no doubt! However, the GUI is often an anti-productivity feature. It takes much longer to sequence through a dozen drop-down menus with the mouse, and to do so each time you use the program, since they don't tell you how to automate the entire task, than it does to invoke a batch file that it took ten minutes to generate and debug. RE |
