Re: Re: Gobo with EiffelStudio 5.4

Peter Gummer:

> "Anybody"? Definitely not most beginners.

Gobo users are likely to be somewhat experienced programmers, 
and with documentation I don't think it would be difficult 
for them. It's the lack of a tutorial-style doc that's the 
problem I think.

> My point is that, most of the time, for most people, a GUI 
> interface is more efficient. 

Is it? It may superficially look like it because, (a) it's 
what some people are used to (familiarity), (b) as you say,
GUI's tend to have _some_ level of built in documentation
in that you can navigate the possible choices. A short 
form documentation, or manpages, or --help, or a tutorial 
is the equivalent in text tools. That's a point where we 
are deficient. GUI tools are often deficient in in-depth 
documentation, because while the GUI itself can make a 
good quick-ref doc, programmers often neglect to do the 
proper doc, which for non-trivial programs is important.

Even for absolute beginners, if you put someone who has never 
used a computer in front of a Windows-style GUI they will 
not know what to do. Interestingly, a guy who did an 
introductory class for this type of people tried, after a 
few GUI lessons, to teach them the Unix shell. With coaching 
they could get productive, and progress on their own (once 
explained how man worked, they could discover features on 
their own) quite quickly and many of them quite liked it 
-- "it's like text messaging". 

The metaphor of a dialogue with the machine and the 
ability to use language-like features is quite compelling,
after all GUI are throwing away language and go back to a 
pointing at pictures...(I don't have the reference handy 
but this report is online somewhere.)

> Ideally, I would want to run a setup.exe (or click a button) and it all 
> happens without me having to understand much.

Do you trust stuff you download? On Linux, you're often told to 
do "configure; make; make install". It usually works but 
I don't like it and I like packages that tell me what 'make 
install' does, so that I can do it in a sandbox or just do 
the bit I need without having an install process put rubbish 
everywhere. When I still used Windows, I used to reinstall 
from scratch from time to time just to flush all the rubbish 
setup by things I had tried. Well, some packages have "uninstall" 
features, but they are often broken or leave rubbish, as 
a dirty uninstall is not a feature a product is judged on. 
Same on Unix, uninstall features are often broken.

Understanding installation often helps understanding how 
the package fits together, which is often useful to know 
to use it.

> because I've written such stuff myself -- and I know that gobo is open 
> source. So I don't expect it to be perfect. But please, take note of 
> the views an outsider.

Your views are welcome, it's just "you need a GUI" is not 
exactly the most appropriate answer I think. But you've 
highlighted some problems and I hope it will motivate us 
to do something helpful.

> Those who are merely curious about Eiffel are not going to be as 
> tolerant of these initial hurdles.

I'd hope people curious about Eiffel start by using the built-in 
features of their compiler of choice, where they should encounter 
fewer problems. You tried to use a combination of 1 compiler 
package and 2 libraries, including low-level C interfaces, which is, 
perhaps unfortunately, sort of 'advanced' stuff for Eiffel tools 
as they stand. The good news is that if you go past that, you're 
done with most of the ugly stuff, it does not get worse 
afterwards.

> I don't care about the other compilers.

Yes but we do, and of our users who also don't care, many 
use the other compilers so ideally we should have something 
that works smoothly for all single-compiler users, which is 
more work than just supporting EiffelStudio.



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