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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.mel.aone.net.au!grumpy.fl.net.au!news.webspan.net!newsfeeds.sol.net!news-xfer.netaxs.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.Stanford.EDU!kithrup.com!sef From: sef@kithrup.com (Sean Eric Fagan) Subject: Re: SALE!!SALE!!! Organization: Kithrup Enterprises, Ltd. Message-ID: <E506r8.9Cs@kithrup.com> References: <32ED8F7B.4F16@pacific.net.sg> <5d0h2f$2u5@uriah.heep.sax.de> <E4zvwJ.72@kithrup.com> <32F51A79.41C67EA6@freebsd.org> Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 01:28:20 GMT Lines: 31 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:34637 In article <32F51A79.41C67EA6@freebsd.org>, John S. Dyson <dyson@freebsd.org> wrote: >I think that we underestimate the learning ability of people >sometimes. What do you mean "we," white man? ;) Bell Labs also published, at some point, a nice article about the learnability and usability of commands in an OS. If I remember correctly, the conclusion was that cryptic commands weren't all that much harder to learn than "intuitive" commands (e.g., "ls" vs. "directory" or "dir"). I also seem to recall that consistency in commands (for example, how options were specified, how wildcarding worked, things like that) was terribly important as well. >However, we are all a bit lazy, and for small docs, >WYSIWYG is more convienient. Things over 10-20 pages, >typesetting-type tools seem to be advantageous to me. I dunno. I regularly use both FrameMaker and groff; which one I use depends more on which machine I happen to be at than what I'm doing. (I don't have FrameMaker for FreeBSD, and at work we don't have an easy way to have troff spit out PostScript.) I used FrameMaker for about nine months to edit a newsletter for a club I belong to; I wouldn't've used troff for that, really. (I mention this largely so I can say, you know, I wish FrameMaker were available for FreeBSD [and at an affordable price].) So I don't know what it all means. Except that "mere" secretaries are quite capable of learning troff and TeX, and some hackers don't want to be bothered to learn either of those.