Linux's Difficulty with Names

JohnTyler writes "This article at XYZ Computing takes a look at Linux's strange naming practices. When compared to their Window's equivalents, the names of many Linux programs are difficult to recognize and even tougher to remember. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it is actually an important usability issue. Just think, if you had to do a bit of graphic design which would be easier to pick out of the menu, GIMP or Photoshop? Or if you wanted to play a song, Media Player or xine?" The article is a bit thin, but it raises an excellent point.

Comments

Re:You seem to be around my age, then.

[Jerry]

Right out of HS in 1959, I attended the Barns School of Business to learn "computer programming", which was really just using jumper cords to connect holes in a patch board to a neutral bus board on the IBM 402 Tabulator. We used the 540 Gang Punch to enter data onto punch cards for sorting in the 402 Tabulator. The purpose of "programming" was to sort punch cards so the tabulator could tabulate them and sent the results to a printer. But, I looked too young and couldn't convince employers to hire me.

So, after bumbing around on a few jobs for a few years, I went to college. Nine years after my first "programming" training, in 1968, I took Fortran-64 programming in grad school. We used the KSR-133 tele typewriter which supposedly poked along at 10CPS, but if you tried touch typing at 10CPS you couldn't push the keys hard enough to make it punch a hole in the yellow spool of tape into which your program was punched. After spending a couple hours typing in my solution to the quadradic equation I'd put my reel of yellow tape in a brown envelope and the prof would mail it to the CDC6600 computer center in a town 120 miles away. A week later I'd get a printout showing the errors in my typing and the process would start all over. If the printout contained a printing of my program followed by the answer then I had completed the task. IIRC, we completed only 3 or 4 problems that semester. The next semester the physics dept had a contract with the local bank and their B200 computer. We still used the same KSr-133 but the turnaround was the next day because we could go to the bank after hours and see our programs being run. If the errors weren't too bad we could use their KSR-133 and do a "quick" correction on the spot.

I never used Fortran after that class, and it was only ten years later, in 1978, that I got back into programming using Apple II BASIC. In 1980 I resigned my teaching job and I've been programming every since. In 46 years I've seen "programming" go from patching a breadboard to using tools like Eclipse, KDevelop, MSVC++.NET on PERSONAL computers that are millions of times faster than the 402 Tabulator, or even the IBM 1400 series transistorized computer, which was just on the horizon as I graduated from Barnes. Now, researchers are beginning to get a handle on optical and quantum computing with 10's to 100 GB of RAM and all solid state storage replacing mechanical HDs.

What a ride it has been!!!