Look and Learn . . .

[Richmond Mathewson]

Wolfgang Bereuter wrote:

"you are an ignorant"  and

"you have no idea about visual learning..."

which both seem a bit strong.

As I make my daily bread by teaching Primary Children
I am well aware of what Visual Learning is,

I teach xTalk every summer to kids between 8 and 14; I
always start with buttons and yoghurt pots - which are
reasonably visual.

And SCRATCH may be jolly good for showing "people  
by means of a different GUI how programming works"

However, that misses the point of the whole posting
series;
that an end-user should not have to learn anything at
all, whether about programming, drag-n-drop, or
anything else involved in program creation: If I need
medical help I can go to a doctor rather than spend
years getting the qualifications and training myself.

I do not see why a doctor (say) should need either:

to train in some sort of computer programming,

or, for that matter,

have to "do battle" by sitting next to a trained
computer-programmer while they try to understand each
other's disciplines with all the concomitant
misunderstanding and confusion that will generate.

A good, agent-led, automated interface with some sort
of forward-chaining logic which is the end result of a
lot of work by a team of dedicated computer
specialists should mean that a specialist in an
entirely different discipline (medicine, cookery,
musical history) can sit down in front of a PC and
with an absolute minimum of effort producea program to
serve his/her needs . . .

Why is this concept rather difficult for some people
to grasp?

-----

After all: when I open a Stack Inspector in Runtime
Revolution and select various settings all sorts of
unseen coding lies behind the implementation of those
settings.

The whole theory of modern human-computer interaction
is based on that idea:

who wants to get "down and dirty" with binary code?

-----

An automated computer program generating GUI is
nothing more than a logical extension of what already
exists.

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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