file attributes

[Barry Shein]

From: gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
>GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible
>to accomplish complex actions.  This stems directly from the "user model";
>the Macintosh was intended to be an "appliance", and its GUI evolved from
>the Xerox Star's, which was aimed at replacing the physical office desktop
>with an electronic analogue.  UNIX, on the other hand, was developed by
>people who wanted to be able to perform interesting actions without them
>having to all have been anticipated in the system software implementation.

Doug, I agree with you 1000%. In fact, I'd even go further and have
wished for more than a decade that there were an even more robust
programmatic interface to Unix (something more like lisp rather than
the shells, the shells are full of warts, particularly once something
large is to be built and tend to constrain solutions to only those
things they were designed for, eg, very little string processing), but
I wander...

On the other hand, one of the strong points of Unix has always been
the notion of a replaceable shell (command interface.) In theory even
VMS has this, although I don't believe anyone has really produced the
second example (I suppose one could argue that this is precisely what
EUNICE was, and there are probably some other minor examples by now.)

Although there are indeed several, perhaps a dozen, different command
interfaces in common use for Unix (sh, csh, bash, ksh, vsh), their
actual variance is very tiny. In fact, they can often run each others'
scripts if one needs to be convinced of their similarity (and that's
by design.)

So, someone comes along with an idea for a radically different
"shell", namely a GUI, fine, we should simply consider it a
confirmation of the original claim. Unix's flexibility wins again (put
another way, lots of rope...) and those who believe they want such a
thing are free to do so without disturbing the rest of us in the
slightest (other than the GB of disk they need because somehow the
value of what they do tends to rest heavily on font choices and color
icon images, but again I wander...)

Let a thousand flowers bloom, and all that, even if some of us find
daffodils quite boring or even weedious.

However, I think the real lesson is not to expect accollades for these
primitive, Sunday morning comic-strip interfaces from the Unix
community at large because many of us are still convinced we're better
off with what we have, for reasons Doug just argued.

I am generally awe-struck at the small-mindedness of some of these
concerns, choosing the correct icon or whatever.

Now, if someone could show me how to develop something shell-like in
expressiveness and power but could operate on multi-media and
networked objects as blossomfully as Unix has on text files, now there
would be something!

  % find /share/images \( -image dog -o -sound bark \) -clipsave dog.out

  % subtitle -lang spanish | vcroff -mfoley -Tvhs120 
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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