[Gllug] Computer literacy, was: ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

[Nix]

On 15 May 2009, Alain Williams said:
> Part of the reason for your depression is that you put time/effort into learning
> how to be effective in your editor of choice. The result is that you know how
> to use it to fast/efficient/...
>
> The modern GUI is good at people who just sit down and expect to be able
> to use a computer without much training and expence of learning time.
> Very many people do not progress beyond what they learned on their first day.

Yes indeed. This is sensible behaviour if you're not going to use it
much, but bloody silly and self-harming if you're going to be using it a
lot...

> I, occasionally, teach people - some of who claim to be computer professionals,
> I sometimes cringe when I see how inefficient their use is.

Yes. This is horribly common: even some of the people I work with,
who've been using computers for longer than I've been alive, do things
like selecting single words and pasting them in elsewhere, or cd'ing
everywhere rather than using paths for one-off uses, or never using
terminal job control or shell scripting even though they're sysadmins
and could benefit hugely from it...

>                                                              Things like:
> enter something in a form, then move the mouse to click on the only button;
> why did then not press return ? Because: they never learned that and more
> importantly they do not have the mindset of trying things out to see if they
> can be faster.

That's because they don't dare. They've been trained by inconsistent
computer systems (with catastrophic failure modes that are too easy to
access) simply to *not experiment* because if they do the likelihood is
that they'll torpedo things completely.

This is one of the attractions of Linux: it's *possible* to understand
it completely enough that there is no experimentation-induced failure
you cannot recover from. But it's hard: modern systems are too complex
and inconsistent for that to be simple. With opaque systems like Windows
it may as well be impossible.
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