On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 10:08:11AM -0500, Allister MacLeod wrote: > On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 09:55:35AM -0500, David Yitzchak Cohen wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 09:20:34AM -0500, Allister MacLeod wrote: > > > On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 09:07:58AM -0500, David Yitzchak Cohen wrote: > > > > find more annoyance than use, and any scheme that's capable of failing > > > > will always fail exactly when you need it to work right, as the sage > > > > Murphy pointed out ages ago. > > > I believe the butt of Murphy's pronouncement was users, rather than > > > implementers. > > Hmm ... then this must be a correlary (spelling?) thereof. . . > > corollary. I'm led to believe that in Canada, they pronounce this > "k3-RAHL-3-ree" instead of "KAHR-3-larry". The Canadian pronunciation > seems to better disambiguate the spelling. Canadians are weird. > > > However, it was an admonishment to implementers to make > > > things so that it's as hard as possible for users to screw up. > > When the syntax classification scheme is trying to examine a user's file, > > it's out of the user's hands whether or not the scheme will screw up. > > Implementors need to make tools that work, and then we can talk about > > whether or not users should be allowed to screw up. (Since that'll > > never happen, I'll probably not get an opportunity to point out that I'm > > a very pro-UNIX guy - if the user requests a gun, give it to him if you > > can, even if you know he's about to shoot himself in the foot with it. > > Everybody has the right to "rm -rf /" just the same as everybody has > > the right to commit suicide. Your computer, your choice.) > > Yes, good point. It would seem that in the context of computer > software, Murphy's Law itself is less apropos than the multitude of > corollaries. (iirc, the original Law was about plugging things in > backwards or upside-down) In fact, one of the greatest things about > software is the fact that what might initially be construed as misuse > can actually be an effective use.. that is, it's often the unexpected > features which are the most rewarding. Or something. Well, since I've been showing off my GNU Screen config lately, we might as well use that as an example. My Dvorak remapping was done using the bindkey facility, which is intended to help translate escape codes for special keys on your keyboard (function keys, arrows, etc.). When I wrote in to complain about some bugs I'd discovered (since my config has the actual programs running within three nested screens, so a tiny off-by-one-char bug gets magnified in a big way), I was laughed right off the list. Clearly, nobody'd ever expected a guy to implement workspaces and session-level keyboard remapping using GNU Screen. However, I can have several hundred total "windows" running at the same time (way more than the compile-time default maximum allowed) - with both global and workspace copy/paste buffers which are shared between sessions - and still access any given window with only a few keystrokes (even fewer if I'm already in the right workspace), so my config can do everything those fancy GUIs can do (which can't be such a bad thing). I guess the cool thing about software that does exactly one unit of work and does it perfectly is that the complexity of the final product depends solely on the insanity level of the users, and that's a very Good Thing (TM) :-) - Dave -- Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor? It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right? Please visit this link: http://rotter.net/israel
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