Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (Human-Nets-Request@rutgers) (09/01/83)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Wednesday, 31 Aug 1983 Volume 6 : Issue 55
Today's Topics:
Computers and People - Electronic Mail comes of Age &
Teaching about Computers
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Date: 30 Aug 83 17:26 EDT (Tuesday)
From: Denber.WBST@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: Re: Electronic Mail comes of Age
"asked for electronic mail network and mailbox address"
The membership application in the registration materials for AAAI this
year asked for that also.
- Michel
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Date: 30 August 1983 03:25 EDT
From: Keith F. Lynch <KFL @ MIT-MC>
I have received several flames in response to my message in HN issue
49. I am afraid I didn't make myself very clear.
I am not "blaming the victim". Far from it. I am blaming the
victim's environment.
The subject, "losers", was unfortunate. It was from the message I
was replying to. I had meant to put it in quotes.
My point (not terribly well expressed) was that there is an enormous
amount of bogus software out there, and much of it is actually doing
more harm than good. I would not go so far as Djikstra, who seems to
believe that exposure to Basic or Cobol can lead to permanent brain
damage, but I do think that many concepts are much more easily learned
by people who have not been exposed to those languages or to such
operating systems as IBM's TSO, or APPLE's whatever-you-call-it, or
various word processing oriented systems. I am certainly not blaming
the people who are the victims of this.
I DO blame the people who are unwilling to learn, or to get along
with other people. I don't care if someone wants to use the losing
SOS editor rather than Emacs or EDT but I will object if he is using
it on a good (public) terminal when people who want to use Emacs are
stuck on the glass teletypes. In this case I will ask them to trade
terminals. And I will probably not put as much effort into helping an
SOS user than an Emacs user if the help requires my getting into the
editor. At the risk of sounding elitist I do have better things to do
than to learn losing editors.
When a person REFUSES to give me the information I need to do my job
right, there isn't much I can do. The 'IBM type' refered to in my
previous message is twice my age, probably gets three times my salary,
and has four times my seniority. He also has a military background.
When I asked him (twice) why he wanted line numbers in Emacs he said
something like "Never mind that. I need to do it for my application.
You don't need to know what that is. Just do what I told you, ok?".
I don't know how to deal with people like that. I wish I had the
option of ignoring them but I don't.
Date: 24 Aug 83 10:04:12 PDT (Wednesday)
From: Hoffman.es@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
... However, on another level altogether, the novice's
intuitions are frequently quite correct! ...
True enough in some cases. But most novices intuitions are not
consistent with each other or with themselves. When asked what is a
good name for a command to get rid of files, you will get many
different answers from different users. A system designed to please
one of them probably won't please many others. (A sizable percentage
of novice users complain that the up and down arrow keys work
backwards, i.e. they say that pressing the up arrow key should make
the TEXT move up relative to the cursor, rather than vice versa. I
guess it's all relative.)
A more useful distinction is between things that are easily
learnable and those that aren't, and between things with a simple,
pleasant, and consistent interface, such as Lisp and Emacs, and things
without, such as Basic. It is well known that beginners ususally
prefer Basic. That doesn't mean it is the right way to go, or that
'intuitions' a user learns from Basic are more real, natural, or
useful than any others.
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 83 10:33:15 EDT
From: Eric Albert <ealbert@BBN-UNIX>
The distinction between fixed and floating point is very
non-intuitive. I never encountered the concept, despite
numerous math courses, until I started using computers, and I
remember thinking it an arbitrary distinction. Furthermore,
it IS "an artifact of the language" -- some computer languages
don't distinguish. Users find these languages much easier to
understand.
I think it is a perfectly natural distinction. Floating point (aka
real) numbers are useful for measuring things that come in continuous
quantities, such as the length of a road, the amount of water in a
bathtub, the resistance of a resistor, the weight of a person, the
temperature in a room, or the brightness of a lightbulb. Integers are
useful for measuring, counting, or labeling things that come in
discrete quantities or states, such as the number of eggs in the
refrigerator, the number of keys on your keyboard, the number of the
current year, the numeric representation of the ASCII character 'F',
the number of times a program loop will iterate, the number of
conductors in a cable, or the number of states in the union. Complex
numbers are useful for such things as measuring AC voltages,
impedances, and currents, or for representing points on a plane.
These are all different TYPES of numbers, and they are used for
different things and different rules apply to them. For instance
dividing the integer 5 by the integer 3 results in a quotient of 1 and
a remainder of 2. Dividing the real number 5 by the real number 3
results in a quotient of 1.6666... and no remainder. This is not an
artifact of any language. It is simply the way the world is.
... Not one that I know of has ever been able to
understand why -1 to the integer 3 is -1 but -1 to
the floating 3 is undefined.) ...
I'm not surprised users don't understand this; I find it
downright weird! Again, many languages will do the automatic
conversion to FIXED here (perhaps warning you if they have to
round).
I find I prefer strong typing. Obviously a language can be designed
to replace a real number with an integer in any context where the real
number makes no sense. Is this the right thing to do? Perhaps it
should be an option. I would leave the option turned off. I still
maintain that if a user tries to raise the integer -1 to the floating
3, he almost certainly isn't thinking clearly as there is no
conceivable reason for wanting to perform this undefined operation
(other than just to test the software to see what it will do. Kind of
like dividing zero by zero to see what your calculator will make of
it.)
The use of "=" for two very different functions (one of which
involves statements such as "X = X + 1" which is
mathematically impossible!) can be bewildering. Here too,
many computer languages use different symbols precisely to
avoid this confusion.
Yes. Basic doesn't distinguish, which leads to confusion,
especially among novices. Nobody should be exposed to Basic until
they have had extensive experience with other languages. I would
recommend Logo, C, Lisp, Pascal, or even Fortran or PL/I as a first
programming language, but certainly not Basic, Cobol, RPG, APL, or
assembler.
Keith, with his inability to see beyond "that's the way
computers work and that's all there is to it" is the one who
displays lack of depth.
Where do I say anything that can be interpreted as that?
There are many important issues, such as how SHOULD numbers work in
a system, how should characters work, what is the best metaphor for a
file system, etc. I have at least tried to make SOME effort at these
decisions. Have you? Or do you just sit back and complain that the
machine is not Doing-What-You-Mean and those stupid computer jocks
should fix it right or get out of the business? Yes, we can have it
convert from integer to floating to byte to character whenever it
guesses that that must be what you wanted, or we could just outlaw
integers altogether (as most Basics do). Kindly do not criticize me
for trying to resolve these issues and for explaining them to other
users, including novice users.
This lack of respect [for users] is, of course,
totally unfounded: it is based on the fact that the user
doesn't understand computer science (which is important to
Keith), even though the user may understand business, or
chemistry, or some other field (which is not important to
Keith) expertly. Solipsism at its most pronounced!
Why don't you get a dictionary. That has nothing to do with
Solipsism even if it were true.
I feel sorry for the people with whom he works, who may
now believe that there is something wrong with THEM.
I think my 'success rate' is a lot higher than yours.
Date: 24 Aug 1983 14:07-PDT
From: Greg Davidson <sdcsvax!davidson>
If your mail reading program does not filter control
characters into something harmless & printable, then it is the
worst reading program I've ever heard of. Its more than just
an annoyance, though: Haven't you heard of the famous security
hole where you send the operator a message with embedded codes
to reprogram his terminal's function keys to execute your
trojan horse program?
Yes, I've heard of it. Our mail program is the standard VMS mail
utility supplied with all VMSs by DEC. We don't have any terminals
with programmable function keys but users have on occasion sent mail
containing (VT100) inverse video, blinking characters, large
characters, and last April some mail had an escape sequence in it that
totally wedged any VT100 that read it until it was turned off.
I use an H19, which is somewhat more resistant to such randomness.
One time a user sent me some mail about Emacs. He had composed the
message in Emacs and he mentioned a number of control characters and
escape sequences by putting them into the text. Lots of fun! (Of
course the message was quite readable in Emacs.)
Is this really the worst mail system you have heard of? I have seen
many that are much worse (hint: what new service is being offered by a
private nationwide computer network headquartered in my hometown?).
Gee, on our system (4BSD VAX UNIX), all three of the mail
systems (Berkeley's mail, UCSD's snd/msg & EMACS rmail) allow
users to edit any message without prearrangement. Of the two
popular ones, and invokes your favorite editor automatically
(if you defined your favorite editor) and rmail is integrated
into the powerful EMACS editor.
Yes, on ITS too. But not on VMS. Sorry, but we are stuck with it.
Many users have been seriously mixed up by earlier computer
experience. Most of what they know is wrong, and they're
filled with superstitions which do not transfer to new
systems. I will grant you that these are the real problem
users. Nevertheless, these users are not unable to learn, and
calling them losers and treating them as such only makes the
problem worse.
If you will look at my original message you will see that I was
saying the same thing. The problem is that there are always more
'problem users' and that I don't have infinite time to undo the ill
effects of IBMs (mainframes), ATARIs and APPLEs. That is why I saw
red when I read in the paper about 'an APPLE in every classroom'.
These are not good for anyone (except APPLE stockholders) and undoing
these poor students' dis-education is going to take tens of thousands
of man years of teaching.
...Keith
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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