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Literacy: Natural Language vs. Code
sirReal.83. writes "The Guardian has an article by Dylan Evans, author of Introducing Evolutionary Psychology. The article discusses literacy in computer languages, and suggests that we are in the 'technological middle ages.' Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking; just as we try to make computers to adapt to us, we must adapt to them." Some good points are raised, with the example of the command line interface used, which is a much better choice than, say, an array of switches or a punch card.
The parent post isn't a troll -- it's a sad fact CS students are learning '.NET' which in 90% of the cases is really VB.NET. They can't even figure out how to pipe simple CLI commands together.
You might think 'well why learn CLI?'. I'll tell you why -- CLI is so ortho you can pipe a dozen commands together and not have to write a whole app to do XYZ for some type of maintaince task. Also relying on vendors to make everything for you means you're incapable of doing anything outside their boxed in world.
The Guardian is like the New York Post of your nation isn't it? Obviously this is just some fluff piece that's trying to play off the Matrix just to get the average reader to go through it.
Let me explain. The Guardian is a newspaper written by Marxists, for Marxists, and as such, their world-view is divided into "the workers" and "the party". The party, or course, are the Guardian's readers. The workers are, well, everyone else. In a Marxist economy, it is necessary for workers to be perfectly interchangeable, because Marx could only understand very generic, unskilled economic roles such as "farm labourer" and "assembly line worker". So a worker could be moved from the farm to the factory and back again seamlessly, wherever the party felt his "ability" could best be used that day. The underlying reason is that if workers are specialists, and there is demand for specialists, that is a de-facto market, and Marxists hate markets. Similarly, the Guardian hates the idea that companies can make money by selling people what they want; they'd rather people not be able to work at all (for example, secretaries writing their own wordprocessors) than for a market to operate. But at the same time, the Party deserves all its luxuries, like a Mac user interface which is far too good for the proles, etc etc.
When you read a Guardian article with this in mind, it will make more sense.