"Easy to use"

[Martin Baxter]

Richmond Mathewson wrote:
> 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.
> 

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