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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.
For a more in-depth discussion of this topic, see Neal Stephenson's essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line.
Nooface
In Search of the Post-PC Interface
Microsoft is oppressing the masses with the GUI. Everyone must learn a scripting language in order to manipulate information. Suuuuuuure.
Who the hell wrote this article, the union of all slashdot posts?
that the customers I write software for 'work' on their computers 8-10 hours a day, and still have very little 'understanding' of what they are doing.
These users, which I can only imagine are representative of most computer 'users', don't really care. They simply look at their keyboards, mice, and monitors, and think, "I don't need to understand what I'm doing, all I know is that I need to do this, that, and perhaps another thing, and voila! A paycheck every 2 weeks!"
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Not really. It is an issue where programmers them selves no longer have to understand computers to program. Going thew college there were way to many students saying "Why do I have to take a course in assembly? We never need to program in it." The future programmers them selves are no longer really understanding what is happening underneath as well. With languages like VB and others high level languages, people can get things done. But this where the scary part is. Is the people who do know how it works in more detail, they are more feared because they know to much and people wont higher them because they feel their skills are to specialized.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The author poses the question of "Would you know what to do if you were left staring at lines of letters and numbers of HTML?" to which I (and most of Slashdot, I suspect) answered YES! Then I found out since my answer was yes, that I am in a minority! Awesome!
:) This is simply a case of somebody "telling me what I want to hear" and I love it! :)
I am a Computer Science major at MUN and with the reduced spending and reduced high-tech jobs my greatest fear is that I will not get a job in a couple of years when I finish my degree. I, along with many other SlashDot readers, might become obsolete.
This article takes the opposite viewpoint -- it emphasizes how important computers and technology are to our future. I particularly liked the article telling us that everyone else is in a dark age.
Indeed.
Dylan Evans obviously has never watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. If machines can't speak the language of children within the next 50 years, somebody won't be doing their job correctly.
Nor has he ever used Windows. How he can claim that Windows is logical much less than anyone should adopt what it uses for logic buggers my imagination.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Porn Sites Really Suck though.
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I know my BCD's (when I'm Sober)
If it is also necessary to spend hundreds - no, thousands - of hours at the keyboard, how are our scientists, the ones that aren't only interested in computers, supposed to get the time to study their own respective fields? I mean, thousands of hours takes up a bit of time, but I don't think we want nuclear physicists or molecular biologists putting their own fields second. I mean, imagine if your surgeon were a little tired from trying to figure out the slashcode he just installed on his home computer? I know my friends can't keep their hands steady holding their Mountain Dew, much less keep a scalpel steady while they're messing with my heart...
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Those aren't direct quotes, but that's the meat of the article.
Imagine that in 1930, somebody said that the controls presented to drivers don't map well enough to the function of cars, and that in the future people would have to know how every drivetrain component works in order to drive or face losing the ability to use public roads.
You don't have to know how a VCR functions in order to use it. You don't have to know how your cell phone transmits signals in order to use it. You don't have to be an engineer or know how a torque converter works in order to drive with an automatic transmission.
I don't see why an article that states that users will have to know how to code in order to use computers is worth a spot on the homepage.
Am I missing something here?
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
The article suggests that machines deal in text instead of through colorful GUI windows. This isn't true at all. The computer has no preference between user interfaces; it doesn't make a bit of difference to the machine.
Whether or not I'm adding a switch on the command line or checking a box in some GUI, I'm performing the exact same function - that is, toggling some flag/setting within the program. It's just a different representation. The article suggests that text is the language of computers. This is not true at all. The language of computers is a stream of octets that are interpreted as instructions by the processor. That is the only language the computer actually understands.
I can say for sure that I find the GUI very efficient at times. For example, I do some video editing and converting, and find myself using mencoder (a tool included with mplayer) rather often. There's a LOT of switches at the command line, and often I find myself spending several minutes browsing the manual page to find what switches I need set. And even then, sometimes I find myself turning to Google to find the information I need. I can't help but think that it could be done much more efficiently with a very basic graphical front-end. The CLI isn't always more efficient.
I know, there's many tasks that are better done from the command line. But to say that a user operating a GUI is further removed from the internals of the computer, is just incorrect. Whether or not I'm adding a switch on the command line or checking a box in a GUI, it generally has the same effect.
The suggestion that people should use CLIs instead of GUIs so that they can understand how their computers work at a fundamental level seems kind of ironic to me. CLIs were originally introduced as just another layer of abstraction. When you type "ls", you don't really think that you're sending the command directly to your CPU, do you? The command shell processes the text that you input, interprets it, and cranks out a result (I oversimplify, of course). Even your file system is just another level of abstraction, as is the C or C++ code that you type in to be compiled. On the other hand, additional abstraction can simplify user tasks tremendously and make learning curves much shallower. Try writing a "hello, world" program in ASM^H^H^H octal, and then in Perl or Python or C or java or whatever, and see how much easier it is!
I'm not sure the average user need to start cracking open books on Java (or even VB). Yeah, as a programmer I take great interest in how the computer works, and it probably makes me more productive. However, I think I was very productive with the computer without actually knowing any programming languages that well.
The key to being productive, after understanding the basics of the computer in terms of memory, files, etc., is tools. How do you search for text in files (grep, find)? How do edit HTML files (text or GUI based program)? How do you move files around? (samba, ftp, etc.)
It may be useful to at least be able to wrap your head around something like a regular expression, though even being able to understand what "*.txt" means is nearly as useful. For the adventurous, a scripting language. I don't think any more, at least given the current tools, is that necessary. Making a full-fledged program is hard work, it takes time. Most tasks you may think require programming are already be implemented.
Obvoiusly, computers shouldn't be made purely for those who have no patience to learn. However, there is a balance, and everyone knowing assembler Java, or even HTML isn't it.
This type of nonsense always comes from programmer geeks, too. Face it, the computer is a tool, not an end in itself. Sure, it'd be nice if every school child could write perl and understood regular expressions, but why? I'm sure most of you can drive a car, but how many can rebuild an engine? Can you do a brake job? Sure, being a mechanic in the height of the industrial age would have given you a financial advantage over your peers, but in the end, the automobile is just a tool that gets you from point A to B. The same is true of computers, it's just a tool. If I'm say, a theoretical chemist, why would I need to understand how to get under the hood of my operating system and tinker with it. It's just a tool. I might be interested in some scripting language that my chemistry visualization or analysis programs use, but for the most part, I shouldn't have to tinker with my computer. I should be able to put the key in the ignition (login) and it should work. If it's broken, then I take it to the technician and let her get under the hood.
An interesting concept. And this is exactly why Open Source software should be promoted.
The spread of human language has been an accumulative process. After the middle ages, when more and more people became literate, there was a corresponding increase in writers. The more writers, the more literature was available, which generated more ideas for more literature. It built on itself. Literature was Open Source. Anybody could take existing material and take ideas from that to build more material.
When we come to a similar stage with comptuers it will be the same thing. Programming will no longer be for the scholars, and more and more people will begin to take part. And the more software in the collective existence, the more resources there are to build more software. But it needs to be Open Source to facilitate the accumulative process.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I wonder if he would have said the same thing about cars 75 years ago? As we get further into this new technology, everyone will be driving a car. You won't be able to get anywhere unless you can fix any and all problems that arise.
As has already been pointed out in other posts, computers do NOT have any preference for text. All he is doing is spelling out HIS preference for text and projecting it as a need for everyone to learn 'the language of the machine'. Does he realize that the language of the machine is just a streams of 1's and 0's? Apparantly not. I can't believe anyone published this drivel.
Making a tool more accessible for the masses is exactly what should be done, and is the normal progression for any technology. Perhaps he thinks that we should program our VCR's by setting dip switches, or reprogramming it's code just to catch the latest episode of The Simpsons?
Yet another example of someone with far too much time on his hands to think coupled with an amazing lack of common sense.
That journalists, even "technical journalists," know jack shit about computers. Let this guy start hammering out all the x86 opcodes one by one then tell me his article makes sense...
Well, the CLI is essentially a direct descendent of the punch card. Back in them olden days, yer Hollerith cards was how you got a stream of data into a system for processing -mighta be program, mighta been data, or both! The output of your input was generally a fanfold pile of scrim.
On antique iron you might be running fortran, cobol or BAL proggie which got compiled and executed, but today thru the CLI your input stream could be a perl -e script, data, commands strung together for serial execution, whatever. The big difference is that now you usually get feedback immediately following your pinky whacking the enter key.
So, while it's improved quite a bit (especially turn-around time), it's not a huge evolutionary leap from punch card to CLI.
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So, I'm reading this little article right, the man is here comparing the ability to read in general with teh ability to read and write code and laying a claim that in the future everyone must know how to read and write code because the current interfaces we have are illusions, or some other such nonsense, and that the ability to read an write code will be integral to ever profession.
I think regular literacy is just great, in an information based economy and world, you really can't get along without the ability to understand the assemblage of alphabetic characters or pictograms if that is your preference.
However, it is not necessary to know some really arcane computer programmingn code to be able to turn on a computer and use an internet browser. That's why we have computer programmers, to give us tools based on these machines that everyone can use, Windows is popular because you just turn it on and look at pictures and words in an easy to understand format (except on very poorly done websites).
We must adapt to computers, sure we do, we need to bring out culture into an age where informations is availible at the touch of a button. What captain Dylan fails to understand is that though it may seem, these machines are not gods that enslave us with their cold bluish glow, but they're tools. He starts out with a premise and is just ranting about that, he has no real arguments, no real evidence to back it up besides the fact that he wrote a book, wow, that makes someone an authoritative expert on everything.
Let's deconstruct shall we, here's my favorite line...
This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.
Now, I get just as pissed when Windows crashes on me, or drops my internet protocols so I can't get on the network. But to say that Windows (specifically mind you, He doesn't talk about Mac OSes, you know the ones that windows holds an eerie resemblance to) creates an illusion that we can interact with computers on a level that the average person would appreciate straight out of the box is just unfounded, and I'll tell you why. Because it works, sure when everything was punch cards and cryptographic text you needed to have some specialized training to get computers to do what you wanted, but now that computing is something well into the mainstream people are picking it up much like any other bit of technology, like hammers (not the best analogy but whatever), I feel that Mr. Evans failed to grasp thtt the reason why computers are so indemnic now is that they do offer a clear and simple solution.
In 50 years, perhaps much less, the ability to read and write code will be as essential for professionals of every stripe as the ability to read and write a human language is today. If your children's children can't speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job - if there are any left.
This part was pretty funny. For someone who wrote a book on evolutionary psychology he doesn't seem to grasp the concept of gradual specialization within a society. you see eventually as a society progresses, you get people whose job it is to think, and expressing that further you beginto develop proffesional groups as thought progresses. Eventually these professional groups become specialized themselves, like docotrs, sure way back in the day you went to your barber if you needed a good bleeding or if you wanted a limb off, but today there is a specialty for almost every concern. I look at it like food, not everyone is a farmer right? Yet, we all benefit from the product of a farmer's labor. Now agriculture has been around for let's say 10,000 years, most of us would be hard pressed if
The people who make comparisons to microwaves and cars are missing the point. A microwave is designed to do one thing and one thing only. A computer is designed to do, well, anything. The idea that the interface of a general purpose tool should be as simple as that of a more specialized tool is silly. The whole *point* of a computer is its complexity.
In this context, the article's assertion makes a bit more sense. People who use tools to solve problems need to understand the nature of those tools. Thus, people who use computers to solve new and interesting problems need to understand what a computer actually does before they even begin to work on a solution. Perhaps in fifty years time we will be using computers for much more interesting things in daily life than we do now. Given the existance of a near-natural language interface and voice recognition, tasks like word processing become trivial. The goal, then, is to be able to instruct the computer what to do in the most efficient way possible. Short of a strong AI, the only way to do that is to understand a bit about how a computer works.
When you look at things this way, the article doesn't seem quite so extreme. I don't know about "every secretary in the world", but I can see plenty of circumstances where complex instructions would need to be turned into "programming" to get anything out of them.
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I'm a programmer for quite a long time. I've dealt with designing interfaces (not too bad at it) and implementing other's designs (some are really great, it's where i've learned). Keeping the insides-in and the outsides-out is what keeps our lives simple. It's also what makes interface programming such a friggin' pain.
Let's take a screen that has just a simple checkbox. On.. off.. that's pretty easy.
Something more complex: a set of radio buttons. If none are on by default, you have to add a check to make sure things are fine.
Now let's add something like the slashdot post-comment page. Strip all "bad stuff", check that both aren't empty and check against a few rules.
How about an international address form. City/state is in the US or CANADA, you check for zip codes of certain types. (I know these two off the top ya' brit's
Want to include a phone number? Forget it. In the US, it's an area code that doesn't begin with 1 or 0, doesn't have 3 repeating digits (I believe), prefix doesn't start with 555, 1,0 or a few other things. No symbols except possibly -'s in the right place...
Now if this were done all premptively, warning you "no, you can't do that" along the way, it's one big pain-in-the-ass. Warning you after the fact that you can't continue is also another big PITA.
But you know what? It's so very necessary. Anyone remember OS/2's SYS1375 error? I hated that frickin' thing. It was the equiv of a segfault or sigbus in OS/2, when a program crashed... something like that. But you know what, those overly-verbose messages are great when you are in charge of maintaining or creating a system.
In the end, I want to be babied from A->B when going through some task or process that has an interface. I like the idea of not needing to consciously think that, "I have to create an image of a cd first THEN i burn it." That's one thing I like about CD burning tools vs cli's making an ISO first and then burning. I wish configuring a kernel to my system were that simple. It'd be nice if it all worked with autodetecting modules upon first-time startup.
It's the difference of wasting those internal mental cycles of figuring out what's going on. If I wanted complex, I'd figure out how to read my phone bill. They like to send it in spanish, though I told them I want it in english. Morons..
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"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Am I missing something here?
Maybe you are.
The car, in 1930 and today, is a simple, single-purpose artifact. However complex it may be under the hood, it goes places and takes you along. The driver needs to steer, and control speed. That's it. To suggest that the driver CANNOT use it without being able to understand, repair and adjust every component is pretty silly.
The computer is a non-specialized, multipurpose artifact. A programmer can make it into a very expensive word processor, or a very expensive ledger, or a very expensive sliderule, or a very expensive map, or ... To suggest that the operator must be able to provide at least some of the instructions the computer needs, in order to make full use of it to accomplish his job, doesn't seem entirely silly.
Any job which requires no creativity (for want of a less fuzzy word) can be done by a computer without any human intervention. For example, if you are simply entering data and running programs A, B and C, a better system could enter the data and run the programs without you.
I would say that any worker using a computer who can do his job without doing ANY programming could be replaced by a slightly better program than the one he is ``operating''. The only exceptions would be people doing jobs which are wholly creative, and could be done without a computer at all (e.g., writers, who could use pencil and paper).
Furthermore, the complexity in a car is not irreducible. A battery, an electric motor, some wheels ... it would be possible to make a car that the average driver could understand. There is nothing there beyond the moving parts. The car is not valued because of its complexity, but because it gets you places.
In contrast, the complexity of the computer is irreducible. Even if it were physically simple and comprehensible (and really, it is), the software is arbitrarily complex, to the extent that we have a new field of science to study it. It's is this complexity which makes the computer valuable.
See what I've been reading.
This guy is an idiot.
By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.
Computers have no preference for text. They have no preference for graphics. If they could be said to have any sort of preference at all, it would be binary. And that would still be a misleading statement.
His goofy comments about html don't make any sense. HTML is just as artficial a construct as the graphics rendered by the browser engine.
Does this guy think that you can just write some code on a piece of paper and show it to a CPU? The text on your screen is already an abstraction.
Sounds like he has some problem with the fact that even idiots like himself can use a computer without any kind of in depth knowledge.
And all this nonsense about forcing computers to adapt to us. WE MAKE COMPUTERS. They didn't "evolve" of their own volition. I'm surprised this guy isn't complaining about how using a steering wheel doesn't require knowledge of the actual steering mechanism.
I agree with you that the parent post is not a troll... HOWEVER:
.NET. It's obvious they are trying to get inside universities because those of us who had actually heard of .NET really had NO IDEA what it is. The Microsoft presentation was very poorly done. :)
.NET etc. Some of the courses are very theoritical/mathematical. The introductory CS courses (CS1700) and the introductory programming course (CS2710) both use Java. And anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Java is more prepared to learn C++ than someone who knows Visual Basic.
You say that CS students are learning VB.NET. I am a CS major at MUN and the VAST MAJORITY of labs at the university run on Linux. We have NO Microsoft-specific courses.
We actually had a Microsoft Canada representive come and give a presentation about
I don't know about other universities but ours does NOT teach Visual Basic OR
A very important point that the author misses here is the fact that most people are pretty bad at literacy. This usually isn't very much of a problem. Even if I'm a bad writer I can usually get my point across to a co-operative reader.
But a computer is anything but co-operative. Being a bad programmer in the computer realm is a much more serious handicap than being a bad writer in the literature realm. Computers are much less forgiving of mistakes. And there tends to be a lot more complexity engendered in computer programs than in the day to day things that people need to write down.
char a[]="lbiitgt l e \n\n\0";main(){for(char*c=a; *(short*)c;c+=2){putchar(*(short*)c);}}
I dunno. I think that's perfectly logical. If I want a wordprocessor, I shouldn't have to do more than request it. The idea of a "folder" where all my "applications" go is a little silly.
On the command line (*nix), if I want an editor, I can type vi. If I want my calculator, I can type bc, and that's it. It's all in a path.
Would it be unreasonable to make it simple enough to start the word processor w/o having to deal with more than one real step and w/o cluttering up my desktop with all the applications I like to use?
Sometimes, people don't have the time nor the care to have anything more than a shallow understanding, and that's ok. If an accountant can do his work well, and can be sped up by a calculator and be sped up again by a computer, he shouldn't have to "figure it out". 1+1=2. On a calculator, "1" "+" "1" "=" should get him 2. On a computer, he should expect the same after requesting a calculator.
You are right, the complexity is what makes it very valuable. It's a multipurpose tool, as you've said before. But so is a car, if you understand it inside and out, so you can turn it into a plane, or an electric generator. Should somethign that is intended as a multipurpose tool be THAT complex to convert from one tool to another?
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"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
If I want to make a 3D game, I can use OpenGL or DirectX. However, I have little clue how exactly telling OpenGL to put a quad with various features on the screen actually gets it on the screen with those features. For all I care it's magic. It just works. OpenGL and DirectX are my lowest levels of abstraction for 3D graphics currently. There's also DarkBASIC et al for those who don't want to go even that far down.
If I want to make a 3D API like OpenGL or DirectX, I need to dig down deeper to understand how graphics cards work in order ot get any realistic amount of speed. Consoles tend to have fewer levels of abstraction.
This is how it works in every area. You have the people on top who have little to no abstraction. They know exactly how every little thing fits together. And they get paid accordingly. The people on the bottom just give you your burger. And are paid accordingly. They don't care how the meat or buns or whatever got there or where the money goes aside from their pay.
I can imagine that like all things, computers are going to reach a level of complexity that's just flat out absurd. Hobbyists work on kit planes but it takes years of training to properly maintain a Boeing 747. As the complexity of planes went up, the requirements for getting hired to work on them also went up.
However as usual, there will be a handful of geniouses that understand everything who write abstraction layer unpon abstraction layer until a level is reached that it doesn't take a genious to get a polygon on a screen.
All that will change is the amount of education you'll need to be able to function at a certain level.
Planes are one thing but it used to be that to fix a computer you had to hunt for a vacuum tube or whatnot that was out and replace it. These days, if a computer breaks, within 5 minutes you can determine the problem then throw out the defective part and buy a new one with little training. It's actually gotten easier to maintain PCs. I don't have to try to find and then fix a transistor in the northbridge. I just throw the MB out and get a new one.
So yes, you do need to know assembler for certain positions to earn a certain pay. But, there will always be other entry levels that don't require that level of knowledge. It's up to the individual to choose what level they want to strive for.
In conclusion, dumb, not well thought out article.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
umm, Windows is VERY weak on the command line. Unless you install Cygwin or some such, the windows command line is barely functional as compared to other OS's. Only the Classic Mac OS is worse for command line use.
Windows scripting is both worse than the command line and better. By default, Windows Scripting is a joke. There is no real scripting capability. However, 3rd party utility's integrate significantly better than 3rd party command line utilities. But by default, Windws comes in dead last for scripting (AppleScript is very powerful compared to Batch Files, and Classic Mac OS is still second worst for scripting).
Longhorn should change this, with the rumoured next-gen command line implementation that approaches Unix-level capabilities.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Bah. Everything in information technology is a metaphor, an illusion to trick the human mind into coping with the machine. Where do you think the term "channel" came from? It's a metaphor, using a nautical term to boil down an overbearingly complex technical description into a concept non-technicians can understand when trying to get their television to show them Gilligan's Island.
Saying the command line is "closer" to the way a computer "really operates" is preposterous. The command line itself is a metaphor, an abstraction that simulates lingual conversation, where a GUI is an abstraction that simulates tactile space.
Most programming languages are based around the lingual metaphor... but not all of them. Prograph was a language based around manipulating shapes in a super-flow chart, and Helix is a relational database language based around the same concept, only in a declarative rather than procedural programming context.
Computers aren't even remotely human... they aren't even remotely alive or self-aware. These are just anthropomorphizations people assign to the system, because they don't understand that the command line, the C++ language, the GUI, are simply anthropomorphic metaphors, conceptual hacks that empower the user.
The very first Hollerith machine used on Ellis Island was very close to a GUI system. You plugged in the card, and turned clearly marked dials to indicate nationality, age, etc, which were punched into a card (stored im memory.) Information was read from memory by putting the cards in a reader, where the appropriate option was lit up on a menu of possible options listed in plain english, corrsponding to the nationality, age, etc, as it was stored on the card. It depended on tactile metaphor to store and visual metaphor to retrieve data, rather than an answer-response metaphor like a CLI. The only way to get closer to the metal is to put the bits into memory by hand with a hole punch.
What's needed are better, newer, more empowering metaphors. GUI's engage the part of the brain that deals with tactile, pattern and spatial relationships, so they're a better metaphor than a command line in most instances. We need to transcend the GUI with a more involving illusion, not just swap it for an older illusion that doesn't take as much advantage of human neurology and psychology... like the command line, or job control language, or patch panels.
SoupIsGood Food
Longhorn should change this, with the rumoured next-gen command line implementation that approaches Unix-level capabilities.
Approaches? Are you crazy? MSh goes so far beyond Unix shells its not funny. Rather than the "everything as a stream of bytes approach"[1], MSh will use real objects. It features multi-language support. Objects in the filesystem. Full, multi-directional, conditional pipes. All features missing in Unix shells. Face it, Unix is 30 years old. It needs to be updated.
[1] Can someone explain whats so great about this? Doesn't that encourage ad-hoc interfaces, a poor programming practice? I realize that much of Unix is generalized for text, but generalizing it for objects is a much smarter idea, one which MS has pulled the carpet out from under us on.
In the olden days, there was an expression used to refer to those disciplines and sciences deemed necessary to the free man. That expression was the liberal arts. Though today we might associate that phrase with endless "humanities" classes, or with a college degree not useful for any particular career, of old it meant simply those arts -- practices -- necessary to exercise the liberty of a free citizen. The classical liberal arts were seven: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy (for which read "physics other than ballistics"), and music.
(Please note that literary criticism, social theory, and deconstruction are not named among the liberal arts.)
We still recognize (I hope) that one who cannot recognize a fallacy in argumentation, or who cannot do arithmetic, is severely impaired in exercising the freedoms of man and citizen. A person who is unacquainted with works of literature may miss cultural references in a politician's speech, but a person unable to cope with rhetoric and logic cannot even tell if the speaker is contradicting himself. Likewise, one who cannot add and subtract cannot tell if he is being cheated in the marketplace.
From a classical viewpoint, what Evans is suggesting is that an understanding of computation has become a liberal art: a discipline necessary to exercise freedom. It is unfortunate and misleading, however, to frame this in terms of "programming languages" or "command lines" -- both of which are simply abstractions (just as is the GUI) on top of the mathematics of computation. The essence that must be understood is no language other than mathematics.
(As an aside: Historically, computer science -- which has little, I might note, to do with "knowing programming languages" -- is an outgrowth of mathematical logic, which is itself an extension of the liberal arts of arithmetic, geometry, and classical (syllogistic) logic. Thus, Aristotle and Dodgson, to pick two, prefigure Turing and McCarthy.)
The same fundamental calculi of functions, algorithms, and Boolean binary logic underlie all of the abstractions we may encounter in computing. GUIs, shells, assemblers, virtual worlds -- all of these are necessarily founded upon the same mathematics. No matter how complex the language or how pretty the interface, it must abide by mathematical logic or it cannot function.
Thus, if Dylan Evans seeks, with Neo, "the code behind the graphics", he should not look to the Unix shell, to C, or even to machine code to find it. Those are tools, not truths, and freedom comes with understanding truths, not simply with mastering tools. Learn the liberal arts -- mathematics and logic -- and you will be much better prepared to defend yourself as a free citizen in a computerized world.
Perhaps you should go and browse through Eric Raymond's new "The Art of Unix Programming" book (you can even find it free online). He discusses the stream approach, and why it's a good idea (vs say the object approach). I'm sure others have covered the same ground, but that's the reference I've seen it in most recently.
I've seen those sorts of crap graduates in TV, in computers, in film, even in music. Every time I do, if I'm involved in the hiring process, I ask "yes, but can this person really do the job?" and when the answer comes back "no", I say "then hire someone who can." You can't get a good job without at least basic knowledge of "how". You have to not only know the "how" as it stands right now, but also know how to learn the "how" when it changes, and then you have to actually go out and do just that---continue learning it. You have to constantly maintain your skills, constantly learn, constantly adapt, constantly grow.
If you don't get the understanding of "why", you're going to be one of these out-of-work tech workers who, as one of my former coworkers once put it, know how to sign their names and write perl scripts and call themselves engineers... but if you don't get the "how", I hope you enjoy asking "would you like fries with that?", as you'll likely find that skill much more helpful than anything you learned in school.... The "why" may help you keep a job or move to a new job, but only the "how" will get you a job in the first place.
Just my $0.02.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
If everything is a stream of bytes, any kind of interface can be created with it, based on its purpose. Simple interfaces can hide complex structure by just exchanging blocks of data blindly, complex ones can use parsers (a thing that Windows programmers never learn) and implement any format easily. And this clearly separates the programs -- they never ever touch each other's address space and can have any, simple or complex, design of their objects. Also whatever can be done with pipes, can be done with sockets, thus allowing remote and distributed processing without any change to the software doing it.
Dotnet's "command line", judging by the descriptions that Microsoft made, allows things to just sit in one happy clusterfuck and mess with objects while they are freely floating inside the shell application, something that is in no way different from writing "scripts" in a large spreadsheet. This is yet another example how Microsoft invents 65537th iteration of the mix of their original DLL and DDE, two ideas that they still can't get right after more than a decade of development.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
There is one area of everyday human activity where complex logical structures are always expressed using natural language without any aid from more formalized languages and systems of expression.
It's called legal system, and it's a mess so huge, no one, human or machine, can predict its behavior, and an army of lawyers, judges and lawmakers of all kinds spend untold amounts of time trying to implement it in their various ways. If computer programming will ever turn into something that resembles this, determining which color should be a pixel (15, 351) ten seconds into a Quake game will be a process not unlike the Kobe Bryant case.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Now granted, the author didn't really do a good job of eloquently conveying that message, but I do think that it is interesting and possibly deserves further consideration.
People keep bringing up the "you don't need to know how a car works in order to be able to drive it" argument. I think that this argument is misplaced. It is normally the case that you do not need to know how something works if you plan to use it for its intended purpose. However, if you plan to use something beyond its intended purpose (e.g., stunt driving), or use something for an entirely different purpose (e.g., using a car as a portable generator), then most likely you will need a more thorough knowledge of how things work in order to do so.
Writing was originally invented for accounting records, but anyone trained in writing can use it for just about anything they want, provided it doesn't violate the DMCA. Computers are just about the same.
- data
- information
- knowledge
- wisdom
the "how" is in "knowledge" and the "why" in "wisdom"<RANT state="sad&disapointed">
It's my experience that a lot of developers out there know a lot of "hows" (how is this done; how does this work; how do we install it) but few or no "whys" (why is this designed like this; why are we doing this; why do we use this languquage/os)
</RANT>
You seem to be, quite well I must say, arguing for freedom from tyrants who are other people (or people-like beings), while the guy seems to be arguing against the tyranny of the machines (more precisely, the tyranny of the act of controlling machines). Which is not to say you are wrong in your summary, of course; just that we're talking sliiiiightly different things.
Which is exactly what I find this surprising here, since I always thought The Matrix was all about this. The author, it seems, is to be unable to understand the concept of abstraction; to become a truly powerful (not necessarily great) programmer, you don't need to figure out how your program works in details, just as, to make a satisfying omelette, you really don't have to know the chemistry behind an egg. Fact of life, people, abstraction strikes at the root of all civilisation, although you're right, to maintain or extend civilisation as we know, we need other tools such as logic.
His other general point, however, is well-taken; programming is, to be sure, fast becoming critical for career in any scientific discipline, but for reasons other than those he mentioned. Among other things, agent-based modelling (pun wholly intended) is the Shiny New Paradigm (tm) these days in social sciences, and obviously, you need programming for swarm intelligence and all that.
But no, you don't -- shouldn't -- need to be able to program your CMOS for that.
More than mere navel gazing.
>Out of the 40 people that started a Java class in my college, only 6 of us finished it. 34 couldn't keep pace and couldn't understand it.
Well, look at how programming is taught today compared to the late 80s.
When we were taught BASIC on machines that were only command line, people were quick to pick it up. Why? Because you could actually do stuff with it. At the time writing an app that did stuff like simple math, outputted to the printer, displayed a simple ASCII graph, etc. This is what computers did and being able to do this with a few lines of BASIC code was actually empowering.
Now look at what computers do now: everything. And they do it with neat-o GUIs. Also, many commercial apps are written so you don't have to program. You don't have Ford telling you that you should be popping open the hood on a brand new car and doing some major work do you?
Anyway, walk into a Java class. First thing they teach isn't how you can use java to solve problems like sorting text files, etc they throw the bible of OOP at you. OOP is fine and good, but if you don't have some procedural experience under your belt and know your way around at least another language Java is just going to be a mix of OOP, classes, etc and other junk a lot of people are not going to see how it all connects to their everyday tasks. Even if you master Java you're writing horribly slow apps designed for cross-platform applications. Not exactly empowerment there. Sure, you can move to any language from there, but starting to learn programming with Java is like kick in the teeth.
I think Dylan should have focused on how empowering HTML, Javascript, and PHP are. After reading a book or looking at a few examples you can quickly get the gist of HTML. Same with javascript. The stuff runs, it does stuff, you can show it to your friends, etc. Shift to PHP are you're doing tons more stuff, while your Java programmer is fighting his or her through a complex language with a strict syntax (at least a lot more unforgiving than HTML or PHP).
If there's a lesson here its embrace modern tools that accomplish something. Moving back to the command line is silliness for most people as they never leave the GUI and don't expect a CL program to be of much use. Giving them the power to generate GUI-like apps through HTML, etc is much more useful than spending 18 hours learning how to use cat, emacs, pipes, uniq, head, tail, etc on Cygwin.
Its a web/GUI world. This is what people should be adopting to. The days of simple DOS-like programs are far behind us and a lot of scripting tasks can be done within robust GUI apps.
how many people drive a car and do not know how a combustion engine works ?
If you don't understand cars, you're fated to do menial jobs.
Maybe a stupid comparison, but I'd rather my kid spoke four, five human languages like her parents than have her spend thousands of hours trying to get into the "mind" of her computer.
Yes, I do understand HTML (big deal) and I "get" my computer. Most kids of today do btw.
Suggesting you'll become obsolete when you don't speak computerese - be it through lazyness or cowardice - is really really naive. I think 10-50-100 years from now it will still be about "getting" your fellow man.
As if "speaking" one of hundreds of languages for machines gives you special powers. I know programmers who still don't get their machine - and wrestle with their VCR and toasters. Lack of 'mpathy', I guess.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Why in the hell would I want OOP at the script level?
Scipting is supposed to be quick, dirty and robust.
OOP can be one of those three (Robust). It's the wrong paradigm for scripting.
And it really complicates the interaction of multiple scripts and/or command line utilities.
The 'Stream of text'/Everything is a file approach is proven, and ideal for this type of use. 'Everything is an object' is needlessly complicated, and quite problematic for the kinds of use that scripts are for.
So WSH, while buzzword compliant, is certainly not up to unix standards.
And Unix has better multi-language scripting support anyways.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
People have been trying for a very long time to figure out how to KEEP folks from having to know all the dirty little details of computers.
You're trying to carry the author's point way too far (to the point of absurdity).
By his references to 'Windows', I believe that the author is well aware of those efforts. The point is that those efforts have gone way too far in the wrong direction. Things should be simplified as much as they can be and no more.
Most 'user friendly' GUIs way over-simplify to the point that simple tasks on the commandline become nearly impossible and horribly time consuming. Haven't we all seen people do open-search/replace-save-close over dozens of files because they don't know how to use for and sed on the command line (and thus, turn a 10 second job into an all day adventure)?
The real argument is one of basic literacy, not mastery. We don't expect everyone in the western world to be a literary genius or to know how to design, build, and run a printing press. However, we do expect them to be able to read and write. In the same way, most people can drive a car even if they can't design one or even rapair one. Many who can repair a car can't design one from scratch. In the same way that we don't hire a driver whenever we want to travel by car, and don't hire a scribe when we want to write a grocery list (and then a scholor to read it back to us as we shop), we shouldn't have to hire a programmer just to interact meaningfully with a computer.
Just as we don't avoid the scribe by drawing little pictograms of the foods we want to buy, we shouldn't avoid the programmer by using little pictograms as a replacement for knowing how to make a computer do what we want.
There are people who get by without literacy in the west, but I don't think anyone trys to deny that they are seriously handicapped nor do they propose that the solution is to eliminate the need for literacy to fully participate in society (Yes, there are some efforts at pictographic signs, but those are mostly for people who are presumed to be literate in a foreign native language).
It's not a matter of expecting everyone to learn shell scripting right now, it's more a matter of expecting that simple scripting and programming will become a basic educational requirement just as literacy went from being an archane knowledge laboriously learned in early adulthood by a few monks and other scholors to being a basic skill we all begin learning before age 6. Efforts to the contrary are a waste of resources.
If everyone spent time learning computer languages, what would that do to the skill of the doctors, architects, poets, etc? Why should everyone's mind be trained to think along the patterns of high level languages designed to run on our von neumann architecture machines?
Computers are tools, and should serve us. I'm constantly telling people, "Don't think you are stupid because you don't understand how to do some task on the computer. Some nerd in a windowless office wrote the code behind this program, yes you may need to learn how to make it do what you want, but it's not your stupidity."
Here's an analogy. If you had an old car which would only start if you hit it in the right spot, pull the choke at the right time, would people applaud you for being an automotive genius? No, they'd say, why don't you fix/sell that piece of junk and get a new one. Why then do people use terms like 'computer genius' (in the general public) to refer to someone who is able to make the computer do what they want? Using the command line is technician work - it is a skill, and a valued one, but it is way overvalued in society today. (This isn't meant to be a troll, but as an example, our favorite software company in redmond encourages this kind of thinking by the design of their software.)
Sure software is useful, and speaking as a software engineer, I enjoy making my own 'tools' for various uses. However, I wouldn't want everyone to have to think the same way - how boring.
It would be far more productive if people took the time to learn an additional human language.
The real reason anyone is a peasant in this technological age, is because they are too impressed with technology, they believe what the technology (internet, tv) tells them instead of thinking for themselves! Example: jdbcmgr.exe virus hoax.
Have you forgotten Apple? It was a consumer system, and there were a number of vendors selling software on it - Visicalc is one software title I used on the Apple II. My daughter learned arithmetic on a software title sold on the Atari-800, another end user machine.
Microsoft merely extended a completely obvious trend. And remember, they bought their operating system from someone who was already selling it.
Microsoft made their big hit, not by opening up a consumer market, but by winning the IBM contract for the OS for the IBM PC. Before that, Microsoft was selling only to hobbyists also! Because the PC *hardware* design was open (just as Apple was transitioning to a closed design), and IBM commanded so many corporate desktops, whoever won that contract was pre-ordained to end up with the desktop monopoly, and the open hardware design guaranteed the extension of the PC platform into every place one could use a computer of that power.
So I'm sorry, but Microsoft did *nothing* creative for a long time. They ported Basic (invented while Bill was in grade school) to get their company started. The bought MS-DOS, which itself is a conceptual rip-off of CPM which was a conceptual rip-off of several DEC operating systems.
Their true ability for a long time was in their shrewd and sometimes unethical business practices, which allowed them to leverage, extend and maintain their PC OS monopoly. They were brilliant at that.
When it came to technology creativity, I saw little from Microsoft until Visual Basic, and probably someone else had a visual IDE before that, I just didn't see it.
Microsoft for a long time had the same attitude as Stephenson - if it didn't happen in the PC world, it didn't happen. Hence for many years they proclaimed the invention of various things that us old fogies had used on big machines 20 years before - such as virtual memory (I first used it in 1967 on Stanfords Wylbur system on a 360/67. That machine also had a total VMM on it).
They kept "inventing" stuff that us more experienced people had been wanting for a long time, since we had it previously, and had to step down in functionality and computer science conceptual levels to use PC's - long after they had the hardware capability to do this stuff.
And they stole ideas right and left. Remember when there were companies with file system compression? Microsoft subsequently "invented" that. Remember the original MacIntosh? Microsoft had to "invent" windows. But the Mac itself was a ripoff of a Xerox product, and it's intellectual ancestor was the Xerox PARC Dynabook project!
Furthermore, they rejected some very important ideas, such as the Unix approach of command line or shell scripting using primitive commands and the Unix approach of keeping all configuration information in human readable files.
This has cost their users immensely, probably cost Microsoft a lot, and was simply unnecessary. GUI vs Command Line is *not* either-or. I am using a GUI (Win2K/IE) to write this, but I also use Cygwin (which has its own warts to do much of my work. Cygwin gives me scripting, and very quickly executed commands with hands on the keyboard. But Windows configuration, done through GUI windows, is much easier for the non-expert than Linux configuration done through command files (although the various X tools are improving there), and I have been runing Unixes at home since 1983.
At some point in the '90s, Microsoft realized that there really people outside their world who might know something they didn't know. They started bringing in experts (although their choice for NT architecture, and hence probably NT architect was a mistake, which is why NT has so much trouble in SMP configurations - configurations which I first worked with in 1970!). Hence when they needed a good database, they stole much of Informix's crew (but still, had it run on their deficient NT Win32 kernel).
Now they have lots of serious pe
The only good weather is bad weather.