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Do You Remember Bob?
GdoL writes: "Do you remember Bob? Byte's editor starts his monthly column talking about Bob the OS Interface from Microsoft in the middle 1990s. And he didn't forget either Bob the programming language from a former technical editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal, David Betz. This OO language is widely use on 'DVD players and set-top boxes produced by the likes of Toshiba, Samsung, and Motorola.' Do you remember any other language long forgotten that is still used in the real world?"
How about C? I hear some people still use it where VB and JavaScript won't work.
Heh.
If I remember correctly BOB had an "feature" that let you assign a new password if you after three login attempts still hadn't given the correct password.
While reading the first article, I was struck by something strange:
In the picture of the Bob UI, it shows a little dog who has a caption bubble coming from his mouth. Well, in WinXP if you do a file search (hit F3), you'll see an almost identical dog.
Maybe Microsoft thought that Bob was ahead of its time?
Anyway, it's strange.
-- Dan
I worked at a nuclear power plant for a while working on the plant monitoring systems. All the PC-based stuff was written for OS/2 using Modula-2. Anybody ever use Modula-2? Anyone ever use it outside of a first year CS class? Turns out it's actually a great language for systems programming, at least with the Object Oriented extensions that the version I used came with. It was actually a lot like Delphi. And much nicer to debug than C++.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Its rumoured that linus is one of the animated characters. I would love to hear him explain why XP just crashed.
http://saveie6.com/
I don't know if it's still in use, but it sure was odd. DataSaab was a division of Saab, and they had their own hardware and system software.
DIL16 was DataSaab Interpretive Language for their 16-bit minis. Looked like assembler but had no registers, and yes, it was interpreted. Completely bizarre. I used it to work on a teller system at Citibank in the mid 70s.
Any other DIL16 programmers out there?
The greatest string processing language of all time. Blows away Perl. In SNOBOL4, the space was (is!) an unbelievably powerful pattern-matching operator. A single match could break apart a string and assign variables with pieces of it. A single statement could succeed or fail, and then there were up to to transfers of control at the end, one for success and one for failure.
... the list goes on.
SNOBOL4 was completely flexible on type, (e.g. you could do "5" + 3); had dynamic memory allocation and garbage collection; had the ability to evaluate dynamically generated SNOBOL4
It's probably still in use, and it was bizaare and wonderful. I also have fond memories of two compiler courses taught by RBK Dewar, one of the implementers of the Spitbol implementation of SNOBOL4.
Hmmmmmm...... how about Latin? Not everything has to be computer related...
S.t.e.v.e.
UNIX Gurus in Hell
I tried to lern Lisp using XLISP (despite having an old book on Lisp for reference), but I failed. Somehow, nothing worked as I expected. Probably I didn't know that XLISP was, despite its name, a Scheme dialect.
Instead I learnt FORTH (using the great F-PC system for PCs), and returned to Lisp later when I encountered Emacs 19.
I still have warm feelings for forth. I remember the first time I got acquainted with forth. It was some 3d framework called graforth.
I was quite impressed with its counter-intuitive reverse-polish-notation syntax:
c a b + = if then
Isn't it much more stylish than writing:
if (a+b==c) {} ?
Bob is a language. Bob is an OS interface. Bob is everything. You would know this if you had joined the Church of the Subgenius.
May Bob be with you.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Real programmers still use Fortran and Cobol. For someone who reads tons of articles about Java and Haskell and who considers C++ obsolete, may be very surprising that large part of scientific numerical computations is still done in Fortran. Do you remenber the demand for Cobol programmers in 1999 (Y2K)? The critical systems still use Cobol.
Although it's an oldie, assembley is still a goodie (imho atleast). I still use assembley in some code that isn't well done by the compiler (gcc) at times to get that extra ms less out of the the app. Only problem is it isnt cross platform/architecture at all.
:P
This is if you regard assembley as a programming language
Just in case anyone is wondering...
It's hard to find any documentation for the Bob language. Having a quick look at some Bob source code, it is a simple OO language without classes, where subclassing is the same as instantiation, much like Self or Cecil. It seems to support only single inheritance, though I gather it's dynamically typed, so there's no need for "interface inheritance".
It's not "purely" object-oriented, since you can define procedures that are not methods of any class. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be any access control: all features of an object are public.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Used for marketting hype, to curse companies into bankruptness, and to bring false hopes since about 6 years, and still in use in my 5 amigas at home :) Nothing beats a A1200 (unless it's a dell 8100 laptop with AmigaXL on it :) ).
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Clippy et all are the only refugees left from that experiment.
*shudder*
But, I suppose, you have to give them some credit for trying a different OS interface. Even if it did suck in all ways...
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Yeah, I remember a really crappy obsolete language, called something like 'x86'. To write even the simplest program you had to write about 1000 lines.
You could barely do anything with a single line of code. Whereas in Perl, you can make the coffee and clean your bedroom in one line, with the obsolete 'x86' you had to pretty much write a bible-worth of code.
I reckon they should consign x86 to the scrap-heap and make Intel processors run directly on BASIC instead.
mogorific carpentry experiments
What used to be a cool company? Geocities or X10? I don't recall geocities EVER being cool. And X10 is cool if only they'd get rid of that horribly crappy camera they feel the need to market to the ends of the earth and then some.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The first version was widely reviled, but the team starting working on a second one. Now it is often true that the third version of a product is the one that catches on -- the first one is rushed out, the second has all the stuff that was supposed to go in the first, then the third can actually respond to user feedback and become useful. But for some reason, Microsoft untypically cancelled Bob 2.0 in mid-development.
Now if you imagine Bob continuing to evolve and eventually adding Internet access (still categorized, simplified, friendlier, etc), then it could have become...AOL. People make fun of AOL also (for similar reasons), but it's a pretty successful company and viewed in many ways as the only tech competitor to Microsoft. Now imagine if Microsoft had short-circuited that with Bob 5.0.
- adam
Last time I checked there were very few books being published on it and most new developers have never heard of it. However, several large insurance companies still use an app written in it. It appears they all bought the source code and continue to modify it to keep things up to date.
As a tip, if you are ever called out to do a consulting gig and the customer mentions "Visual DOS", run like hell.
Don't blame Lisp for the failure that was Microsoft Bob!
This would be like blaming general relativity for atomic weapons or Thomas Edison for phone sex and the psychic friends network.
As we all know, Microsoft is absolutely merciless when it comes to tolerating failure. People get bounced out of the company constantly.
So does anyone want to guess what happened to the program manager for Bob?
That's right. Bill Gates married her. Go figure.
The idea of predictive interfaces was interesting, but Bob had the fatal flaw of being way too complicated for the hardware of the day. Some of the technology lives on in Office's Clippy, but Bob itself was a disaster to the point that even the people who pirated it returned it.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
There have been rumors that the print edition may be returning, based on passing comments by certain coumnists in their web journals. But nothing tangible yet
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That's when my father bought his Gateway too, I remember helping him set it up and getting a kick out of Bob. Totally useless, but the little geography quiz game rocks! We played it for hours.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
There are some libraries, such as LAPACK, BLAS, LINPACK, EISPACK, etc, that are still widely used. They are well written, complete, and, most important, well debugged.
If you look into Octave source code you will find those FORTRAN libraries there. Since they are public domain, Matlab and other commercial number-crunching software probably use them as well.
They are still coming up with new FORTRAN versions, I believe FORTRAN 2000 is the latest. Someone once said that we don't know which language people will use for numerical analysis in the year 2050, but we know what its name will be: FORTRAN.
It's still used in scientific applications. I know three years ago, when I contracted at Raytheon STX (formerly Hughes STX...reasonably big name in aerospace), the guys who did the number crunching side of things worked with FORTRAN a lot.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
And so what if it doesnt encourage good code writing? Thats not the point of it. If you want 'good code writing' you start learning more serious languages and formally learning computer science.
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For those interested in old languages...
"The Retrocomputing Museum is dedicated to programs that induce sensations that hover somewhere between nostalgia and nausea -- the freaks, jokes, and fossils of computing history. Our exhibits include many languages, some machine emulators, and a few games.
Most are living history -- environments that were once important, but are now merely antiques. A few never previously existed except as thought experiments or pranks. Most, we hope, convey the hacker spirit -- and if not that, then at least a hint of what life was like back when programmers were real men and sheep were nervous."
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/retro/
Mason, Buildkernel and more: http://www.stearns.org/
RPG and RPG/ile! wow... You must be using an AS/400! Large portions of which are programmed in another set of languages that fit this category: plm*.
A senior engineer once told me "the only reason for a new hire to learn any plm language is so that they can understand what the current code does when they reimplement it in C++ or Modula-2."
There's nothing wrong with modern BASIC interpreters/compilers; they support the same kind of basic structure that everything else teaches.
And then there's PostScript. PostScript isn't forgotten, but there aren't a whole lot of programmers who know how to use it. It's a rather unwieldy language with a lot of primatives, but it looks a lot like forth. I preferred it over forth though, as it struck me as being a lot cleaner. If I were going to use a reverse polish notation language, it'd be a stripped down version of PostScript. If anyone wants to learn PostScript, Adobe sells a language reference manual and some tutorials that cover the language very nicely. Ghostscript is all the language interpreter you need. Then you could do cool stuff like make the printer compute and print calendars for you.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
One of my favorite quotes is from Steve Ciarcia, who wrote the long-running Circuit Cellar column in Byte (long since evolved into Circuit Cellar Ink Magazine). Steve preferred to do most of his work in hardware, and viewed software as a necessary evil upon occaison. Steve said this in one column, and it's now immortalized: "My favorite programming language is solder."
Do I remember bob?
Do I remember waterworld!
OK, first I have to admit that I was one of the developers for Bob. Don't hold it against me, it has been a long time since I worked for Microsoft. Most of the other Bob developers have long since left as well.
Bob, was one of the very, very few truly creative product attempts for the general market Microsoft has ever made. The first version was deeply flawed, but it also had some very good ideas. Microsoft is not very comfortable with the messiness of creativity and so like a foreign microbe Bob got expelled before these problems could be fixed. Version 2 got cancelled just a week before going into general beta.
The product started out as skunk works, and if it had stayed like that, we might have done a better job. However, I think the biggest curse was that mid-project our Product Unit Manager (PUM) became Melinda French, soon to become Melissa Gates. Melinda never had much direct say in the product, but she was obviously very well connected. We then got showered with money and developers and it went to our heads. It has become a very good object lesson to me on the dangers of over-engineering.
What I find distressing, though is that the good ideas that were in Bob are ignored, and no other product seems to be picking them up.
Here are some of the key ideas:
* Menus are not necessarily the best UI. Think about it; they are passive, they quite often show lots of options that are in appropriate, and the commands are stuffed in all sorts of weird places. Even experienced users have trouble finding some of the options.
* A shockingly high percentage of people are still scared of computers. If you are truly going to create consumer software you have to address this somehow.
* UI is a conversation. GUI's are built on the realization that we are very visual creatures. But what about tapping into our sociability? We are very social creatures. There is a body of evidence that shows that people interact in a social way with their computer (really!). That is where the characters come in -- in extensive usability tests we found a real benefit to them. They helped allay the fear factor and they served as a useful UI metaphor -- UI as a conversation. By the way, the characters were always completely optional -- there was a very easy way to turn them off completely.
*Task basked UI. Most programs are general purpose programs that do quite a number of things. The only problem is that the vast majority of people only use a small fraction of the features. One solution is to take the code for word processing and present it as a family of specialized tasks. So you would end up with a letter writer, a report writer, an e-mail writer, a list maker, etc.
I wrote Bob's Letter Writer. This may sound like a weird specialization, but since we knew that people using this particular program were just writing letters, we could do a great job of making mail merge easy, and also doing neat graphic effects (ala Publisher) that would appeal to someone writing a letter to a friend.
* Files are a low level concept. I mean really -- why should the common user have to care about such a geeky thing as a file? They just want to get their document. They could care less about whatever low level construct the developers have come up with to store this information, and really they shouldn't have to. It is weird that we still do not have an object oriented OS. My biggest disappointment with Linux is that it has done very little to push forward truly new ideas (I'm still rooting for it though).
On a technical side, the reason why Bob performed so poorly was because we tried to create the very first OLE component system that worked just as well for C++ as for Visual Basic. VB was not yet up to the challenge, and yet most of the apps were done in VB. We also used every Microsoft technology (the Jet database engine, the Quill word processing engine, VBA, etc.) and yet machines of that time only had 4 megabytes of memory! We required way too much memory for the time -- probably around 12 MB. The graphics looked bad because we had such a tight memory budget that we did not use any bitmaps at all. Everything was done with meta files (vector objects). On top of that we had to write to Windows 3.1 -- 16 bit programming.
And I credit Bob for making them feel comfortable with the computer. My son began playing with the computer at five thanks to Bob. He still occasionally asks if the Bob CD is still around. The problem with most of us is that we see things through OUR eyes as opposed to seeing through the eyes of a child. Yes, Bob was rondly trashed in reviews....and all the reviewers were ADULTS!! It shows how truly clueless so many of us can be...software designed for children being trashed by adults.
A five-year-old can understand BASIC, as evinced by me. I think the first program I ever saw was something stupid like:
10 BORDER 5 : PAUSE 10 : BORDER 3 : PAUSE 10 : BORDER 2 : PAUSE 10 : BORDER 7 : PAUSE 10
etc. , but to a non-programmer's mind, it is easy to see the connection between this sequence of commands, and the result (bright flashy screen output). This is the first step of learning to program.
Try writing something in C or Java or Haskell to the same effect..?
You can see Bob alive on Windows today as a DesktopX theme (www.desktopx.net).
= ht tp://www.wincustomize.com/library/accounts/Frogboy /dx/bobxp.jpg
;)
Theme is on Wincustomize:
http://www.wincustomize.com/preview2.asp?source
It's Just for fun. Nobody in their right mind would run this as their UI. Just like no one in their right mind would use Bob before.
Scheme, I hate to tell you, is not exciting. And until the world switches to lisp, when students move on to more imperative programming they're going to be confused (or vice versa if coming to scheme from imperative). If you dont make it interesting for the beginners, they're not going to want to continue onto the more 'serious' side of it.
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I had to read this book for a graduate Mass Comm class two years ago, and it is without a doubt the most awful excuse for experimental science that I have ever seen. Unfortunately for the authors, I had taken a class in research methods before I encountered their book (they should consider doing the same).
It's shoddy science, through and through. They ignore intervening variables, operate every experiment without controls, provide no accounting for intercoder reliability, the samples are always too small to be statistically significant (only one had more than 30 participants, many had less than ten), and comprised of forced participants (Reeves' and Nass's freshmen psych students at Stanford, to be precise. Even without a grade on the line, that's a bad sample). Usually, they rely on reported rather than observed behavior, and the only operating hypothesis ever examined is their goofy "equation" (you want me to spoil the beginning of the book for you? Here is The Media Equation: Media Equals Real Life. That's it. Word for word).
As if that wasn't enough, they make constant generalizations of their results (which with forced, nonrandom sampling is the first thing thrown out the window). They grandstand on every turn -- everything supports the Media Equation, and there is nothing it doesn't affect. You should always be suspicious when "scientists" do thirty experiments and always find their hypothesis supported exactly how they predicted. It's usually bunk, and in this case, it's a pantload. In one instance, they even admit to writing the hypothesis AFTER the experiment was performed. They make repeated references to other "research" in this area, but if you read through the bibliogrpahy, they are merely citing *themselves* from previous experiments. Many of these experiments, if you were interested, have still not been accepted for publication, many years after they were done. Most are not even available at the authors own Web sites. If it weren't for the fact that The Media Equation was published by Reeves & Nass's employer, I doubt whether they could've goten it published at all.
It's bad science, and it's only an afterthought: they plainly thought up their "equation" first, and then set out to prove it. That's the Scientific Method in reverse, people.
Let me give you one quick example in reference to the poster above: in the larger/smaller pictures experiment mentioned above, they show participants photographs of people's faces, some in close up and others standing 10 yards away. And the "test" is showing the subject another photo of the same people, and seeing which person the recognize most often. Guess what: it's the person who's face they saw in close-up. Surprised? You shouldn't be. No thinking adult would be; you see the face close up so you see more detail, and see it better. Plain and simple. But that's not the conclusion Reeves and Nass come up with; they decide instead that this turn of events means that you are having a psychological reaction to the face, and the biger face makes you happier because it seems more like a person. So if you think it's a person, you will remember it better.
That's the media equation, you see? The more person-like an electronic communication is, the better it works. The only time this has been tried under real-world circumstances, of course, is their grand experiment: Microsoft Bob. Funny how well that went over, huh.
Man, I hate that book.
Nate
PS - you might try the following link to Amazon, I submitted the review under "n8willis": here.
PPS - if anybody cares, I'll follow up what I say by emailing them the paper I had to write about this ridiculously bad book; it goes into more detail. Or perhaps I'll submit it as a /. book review. I meant to at the time, but it was just way too long....
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
It made programming *fun*. I took examples out of books and tried to change them around...make them a different color, sound different..whatever. That required adding things, taking some out, changing others. After awhile, I knew how to make my own programs from scratch.
With C and its arcane conventions its hardly easy for the complete beginner. Heck, there were times with basic id get really frustrated.
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You're not much for web pages, are you?
I find this bit about Bob being used in DVD players to be rather interesting. As the creator of the language, can you tell us a bit more?
/Brian
The funny thing that I see while reading the comments is the blasting of Clippy and the Dog for being cute. This group of people actually love and enjoy these little ai characters and build them for themselves. I see them in many different channels on IRC. The most notable one is purl. So, would it make you all feel better if Clippy reacted to ! commands and wasn't so cute? The functionality that these "bots" provide is not the greatest, but they are useful and are needed. Otherwise, purl wouldn't exist.
Oh, and how could one forget the greatest "bot" of them all? The computer from Star Trek. "Computer, where is Worf?"
You want these bots, You need these bots. If you don't like the manner in which I provide these bots, then why don't you sit at a keyboard and write one yourself?
This is not the sig you are looking for...
For a product that failed to make an inpact on the market, Bob has a supprisingly large number of entries in Microsoft's Technet. Despite Bob being gone, its annoyances and bugs soldier on through Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Office and ultimately, Windows XP.
Firstly the sound themes are already present in BOB. So is the annoybot that ultimately becomes clippit. Then there are the sound schemes. And cab files. But there are prehaps a lot of technical features that ultimately appeared in Win95, the P!us pack, and later.
When you want to annoy the hell out of some MSCE or Microserf, you tell them that Windows NT is Microsoft Bob on top of a bloated WinOS2 shell running on top of 16-bit OS/2 1.3
This explains the extensive entries for both MS OS/2 [in both Technet and WinNT/2K help], and Bob. It's a handy place to hide surplus bugs. :)
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
You can (or could) write viruses in it too.
Best Slashdot Co
Unfortunately, I never did figure out how to open a network socket in PostScript. It would have been a really cool hack...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I briefly worked in that world but thank God I now work on the client side and write C/C++.
Considering IBM gave RPG away on AS/400 on many versions of that OS, it was the bread and butter of many, many businesses; many of which still use it. It was butt-ugly, but it got the job done. I remember getting back to Cobol after RPG and being relieved about it.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
You are disrespecting a very large portion of the business world. I will agree that there's not much pleasure to be had in using (most) COBOL environments. However, COBOL fills a niche that, until very recently, nothing else out there could fill. What's that niche? Specifically, it's the niche of very high volume processing systems that must be flexible and undergo change on a regular basis (in other words, must be maintainable).
/. culture.
It's not a given that COBOL is a scalable language. However, the best implementations of COBOL have always been the ones that reside on highly scalable architectures, i.e. mainframes (usually IBM's). It's also been true that the best language on those scalable architectures for business problems has almost always been COBOL. Therefore, businesses with very high volume needs have used COBOL. It's not difficult to understand.
Now, I'm sure IBM looked at public perception and said something like "Hey, everyone seems to despise COBOL. Maybe we should do something to get a new language in the works so we don't lose our shirts." And then was born their support for Java. I think you should expect to see Java take over tasks that COBOL would previously have been used.
Also, I think you're absolutely right. Mostly non-IT related companies probably are using COBOL. But who really pays the bills anyway? You think IT companies pay the bills? Really?! Despite our over-inflated self-opinion, IT will always be a derivative industry. Just like accountants, HR folks, etc. we will only ever have jobs where other industries already exist. IT has no value in a vacuum.
My last point is this: Every programming language out there that actually gets used, gets used by a community. Every community has a culture. And every programming language serves that culture. Don't think this is true? Try using VB in a Unix shop. The culture clash will be immediately apparent.
So, people still do program in COBOL; because it works and because that's how they and their peers think. End of story. It would be stupid to deny the reality of that. But those people aren't necessarily stupid for being the product of their local culture. Just like we're not stupid for being (at least in part) the product of the
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Microsoft claims that they have been really innovative, but most of their technical stuff has been "inspired" or invented by someone else, from DOS to Windows, etc.
However BOB is different. BOB WAS innovative. This shows one important lesson folks: as much as MS talks about "innovation," innovation is completely meaningless. When a problem arises we can resolve it, but every product does not need to be technically innovative.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Because MS Bob is a funny joke. It's one of the bigger megaflops I've ever seen from them.
Wait a minute. Wasn't apple advertizing the G4 as a Gigaflop system? I thought the more megaflops the better. Maybe you mean Microflop. (for those that don't know, a flop is a measure of processing power, the more, the better)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
According to the XLISP home page, the Bob source code was last updated today (oh, ok, maybe in response to the /. article). But at least the author is out there and paying attention...
Heh! Klingon programs don't have parameters. they have arguments! And they always win them!
Har!
dave
Compaq make Visual Fortran. I was supposed to learn it for a project, took one look at it and re-specified all my tasks in Visual Basic.
dave
I'm in a class learning it now. Boy does it seem usless
It has a different problem domain. APL is heavily used in statistical and financial analysis and Perl is used for text file processing. You really can't beat APL when you need to do math work, especially math work involving huge sets of data.
> the general market Microsoft has ever made.
yes, many people forget that. It shouldn't be that hard to remember all three innovations from microsoft:
1) 8 bit BASIC. Yes, the language existed, but actually implementing it for those silly little hobbiest toys as a commercial product was innovative.
2) The usable word processor footnote in 1984 (Word 1.0, Mac). Yes, we *could* make footnotes in wordstar, but it was a PITA. I'm told that Word Perfect came out with a footnote the same year, but it would be anothe rcouple ofyears before WP was in wide use (WS still reigned. Right up until that WS 2000 fiasco . .
3) Bob. Oddly, I've actually met two students who have seen in--both times in response to asking if anyone had ever heard of it. One not only remembered its existence, but actually thought it was cool, and had spent a lot of time at it.
And why doesn't it surprise me that most of the people from MS's last round of innovation are gone??? I still occsasionally use what I think are the final two decent products to leave MS: Word 5.1a, and Excel 4.0 (both mac).
Hawk, who really isn't anti-ms, but a) just hasn't seen anything worth owning from them in close to 10 years now, and b)has the usual free-market economists' distaste for monopolies which mess with his precious markets.
1. We think A probably implies B.
2. Let's devise an experiment to try and show this.
Admittedly, that sounds more vague than I thought it would.... The difference is that they try to devise the experiment in order to get the results they want to see, rather than devising the experiment to be neutral and then testing the hypothesis. Or, to engage in some wishful thinking, more than one hypothesis.
Besides, they use the language of statistics, but they clearly have no understanding of it (disclaimer: I am still bitter at having had six hours of statistics in college from a old Analysis professor who made us do proofs on everything). Example: they give a survey, asking respondants to check "always/sometimes/rarely/never" as their response. Then they do means and standard deviations to report their results. That's absolutely meaningless. First of all, the numbers you get are completely dependant on how you map those qualitative, non-numerical values to numbers, and secondly, nominal, categorical data like that has no correct mapping because it's nominal, and not numerical.
It doesn't matter how you encode it, saying you've taken the average of NBC, CBS, and FOX or the standard deviation of Red, Green, and Orange is meaningless. You can assign values and weights to them and then do your calculations on those, but it's totally arbitrary.
Nate
PS - also, before someone else mentions it, yes always/sometimes/rarely/never has order to it; that is called ordinal data. But it's not continuous, and order in a set does not imply oh, what's the word... interval? You can say that the person who checked sometimes ranks ahead of the person who checked rarely, but not by how much. Not even for a single response, much less for the data set as a whole.
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.