[antlr-interest] Re: Issue & bug tracking for ANTLR

Anthony Youngman Anthony.Youngman at ECA-International.com
Thu Nov 25 03:32:20 PST 2004


I came across an interesting article a while back, which said that a lot
of nix people are very literary. Plays on words are very common in nix
but not elsewhere - where else would you get a mail client called
"mutt", or "biff" (allegedly, the name of the author's dog)?

One of the *infuriating* things about modern computing is that GUIs dumb
it down so much that EVERYBODY is treated like an idiot and experts
aren't allowed to get on with the job.

I'll give you that wizards *can* be useful (and that XML was *not*
designed to be read or written by humans in the normal course of events
... :-), but - and I don't mean this badly - can I give you the
following thought: "the average user is incompetent". So don't hamstring
the experts with GUIs and IDEs designed for idiots.

NB - I'd class myself as both "average" *and* "incompetent" as far as
ANTLR goes - so no disrepect there, and as for anything in general, just
look at car drivers, or UK customer service, or most things. For a
professional example, look at lawyers - why are the good ones expensive?
Because there are so few! I'd guess that's true of pretty much ANY human
endeavour ...

Cheers,
Wol

-----Original Message-----
From: lgcraymer [mailto:lgc at mail1.jpl.nasa.gov] 
Sent: 24 November 2004 20:43
To: antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [antlr-interest] Re: Issue & bug tracking for ANTLR


Gack!!!  One of the nice things about modern IDEs is that they
generate Ant or make code for you, and provide wizards to guide you
through the rarely used ("advanced") features when needed.  Textual
representations of dependency relationships are good for processing,
but mediocre for communicating to humans.  The "filthy xml spec" is a
feature--it is just enough pain that people have been driven to put
together friendly GUI front ends.  Makefiles are traditionally
incomprehensible to the average user--how would HumAnt be an
improvement with a make-like syntax?

Cheers!

--Loring



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