[Discuss] Discuss Digest, Vol 136, Issue 6

[worley at alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

> From: markw at mohawksoft.com
>
> You are probably right, but like I said in another response, maybe my
> brain is too "fixed" to using words like make, cc, g++, etc. rather than
> the motor motion of point and click.
>
> That being said, I like word processors, spread sheets, cad programs,
> email, the web,  all the things that you do all the time. Why does
> software development need to be so different?

I'm not grasping what your objection is.  It seems like you want things
to be done more through point-and-click than through typing letters.
And yet you list e-mail, for which I use RMAIL on Emacs, and thus can do
100% of what I need through various keystrokes.  Similarly, the one time
I had to put serious amounts of data into a spreadsheet, I carefully
memorized the various shortcuts that could be used for that task so I
could keep one hand on the page I was transcribing from and the other
hand could type TAB, DOWN ARROW, RETURN, etc. to set the fields on the
line to the right values.

I think the core of the problem may be that programming requires
entering a lot of high-entopy text, and the bandwidth of typing is a lot
higher than that of point-and-click.  You really don't want to specify
which variable's value you want to look at by picking it off a popup
menu.

Dale