Tool -flag considered harmful (was: grep replacement)

[Michael Urban]

In article <10989 at cgl.ucsf.EDU> seibel at hegel.mmwb.ucsf.edu.UUCP (George Seibel) writes:
>How many of you have ever tried to teach UNIX to a casual user?  How about
>trying to *sell* UNIX in industrial environments where the amount of training
>required to use an O/S is a major consideration?  Creeping featurism is bad,
>tools are good, agreed.  But there comes a time when the tool philosophy
>needs to bend a little.  Context in grep and diff is just such a case.

I have spent the last five years here doing exactly what you describe--
teaching Unix to casual/new users, fighting the "VMS/Unix" wars with
people whose definition of "user-friendly" is "English command names",
preparing training materials (DEC once bought a thousand copies
of one of my manuals for internal use), and the like.

I am no longer convinced that the tool philosophy needs to bend.  
Instead, I suggest that we give the casual users training materials
that let them confidently *think* in the traditional Unix "tool-oriented"
manner so that they can use the system more effectively.  Attempting
to add features and prepackaged shell scripts is similar to answering
a user's "how do I do xxx" question with a "cookbook" answer; the
result is that the user will be back the next week with "how do I
do xxx+1?"  I, for one, do not think that users, even the most
novice secretarial type, are (in general) too stupid to understand
that they can find out how many files are in their directory by
typing ls|wc .  The problem is that Unix does not even begin to
approach the quality of documentation that you find in systems
that are considered "user-friendly".  If Unix came with a warm and
friendly glossy color manual with lots of pictures, one that explained
FROM THE BEGINNING about the Unix "tinker-toy" approach to commands,
I can promise you that many of the perceived problems with the
ease of use of the Unix environment would go away.  
-- 
   Mike Urban
	...!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban 

"You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"