"Easy to use"

[Richmond Mathewson]

I had a peep at the latest downloads on the Apple site
and there was Revolution Studio 2.8.1 which was
described as:

"easy-to-use and packed with features"

The "easy-to-use" surely only refers to a small subset
of the feature set (i.e. those that require little or
no coding).

Even the documentation can prove a bit opaque to new
users.

This is similar to claims that have been made about
the current cross-platform, cross-OS GUI: - but it is
not easy to use for people who have never used
computers before.

Working with an 11 year-old who had never done any
programming before RR was not "easy-to-use" at all.

By way of comparison we played with the OOO equivalent
of PowerPoint.

As the 11 year-old only wanted to bung together 25
images of trolls from the internet into an automatic
slideshow OOO won hands down.

When we moved on to try a calculator (+,-,/,* 
sophisticated stuff) we rapidly bogged down in the
child's lack of understanding of variables and
constants: we only got somewhere after sitting on the
floor (a long way away from the computer) with lots of
plastic cups and buttons - but I had to teach him.

Until somebody can cope with the following ideas, no
computer programming package (however O-O it may be)
will be easy to use:-

1.  A=A+1

2.  Looping

"We" (and by 'We' I include the staff of RunRev) have
"been at it" so long we have forgotten that.

4 Years ago I sat in a classroom in the University of
Abertay as part of what was passing itself off as a
MSc in Computers and IT while somebody tried to
explain these 2 fundamental concepts to students - as
I had the advanytage of having had them explained to
me 30 years earlier I fiddled with my double-sided
slide-rule - who just couldn't get to grips with this;
hence a comment:

"This is stupid, everybody knows that a number cannot
equal itself plus 1."

Somewhere down the line an extremely odd idea has
developed that anybody can program a computer without
learning first principles - this is seriously
misleading.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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