On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 03:31:38AM +0800, Andy Sy wrote:
> The guys responsible for the GNU tools (info, autotools, emacs <andy
> puts on asbestos suit>, etc...) may be masters of hacking, but frankly,
> their
> tools are among the worst around when it comes to usability. The GNU tools
> take
True, true, true. Having attempted to use the autotools myself I
wholeheartedly agree that they are certainly not the paragons of
usability that they could be.
As for emacs, well, I wouldn't quite say that. I happily use Emacs for
all my large editing tasks and find it quite more usable for power text
editing than anything else I've seen. The fact that it's customizable
makes its usability all the more configurable.
> forever to learn and tragically this means that a lot of people will never
> get
> to harness all that power. If it weren't for Linux, they might not be as
> popular or as de rigueur to know today. I believe Linus chose them because
> a)
> of the licensing and b) because they were pretty comprehensive. NOT because
> they were particularly well engineered in terms of ease of use.
>
N.B.: Linus did not use the autotools for the Linux kernel build. It's
quite possibly the largest single piece of Free Software that doesn't
use the autotools. The rest of the GNU utilities were used as a matter
of course, and hell, they're used even by FreeBSD! No one's bothering
to write replacements for them that use BSD licensing, as far as I can
see.
> Knuth's creations are another example... TeX, Latex, etc... may be powerful,
> but their popularity suffers because they are so hard to master. I'm sure
> Knuth could've made them easier to use without sacrificing their power,
> but engineering user-friendly programs is clearly not his strong suit.
>
Ahem. TeX and LaTeX are de rigeur tools for anyone writing scientific
papers to be published for major journals. You'd be laughed out of the
offices of some major journals if you tried to submit a paper typeset
with MS Word! I wouldn't consider them at all difficult to use,
considering the complexity of what TeX and LaTeX try to do. They're
primarily typesetting systems intended for scientific papers which are
heavy on mathematical notation. TeX uses notation that essentially
approximates how you'd read a mathematical formula. What could be
easier and more intuitive than that?
That being said, despite your choice of a few bad examples, your main
thesis isn't invalidated. The biggest example I would give is the state
of GNU/Linux on the desktop as a whole. That depends totally on
usability, and how usable are Gnome and KDE compared to even Windows,
and not to mention OS X?
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