[lordofduct]

see the point you don't understand is that:

Quote

And because it was never intended to be a shell, it does most of what the shell does for you, poorly.

Is purely subjective. And that 'opinion' is the case of it all.


And I find it ironic that you call it a shell, and the command prompt is often referred to as the shell. (I know you didn't mean it the same way, hence it being a literal irony)

Quote

In other words, the native toolset of the posix-compliant CLI is an inherently more powerful and more flexible environment for development, as well as any other form of text manipulation you might engage in, than anything else you'll find implemented.

more subjective nonsense.

You like the command line... but that doesn't make it inherently more powerful. All it makes is you sounding like an elitist twat which plagues the *nix community.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 04 April 2012 - 03:08 PM

[jon.kiparsky]

Quote

And I find it ironic that you call it a shell, and the command prompt is often referred to as the shell.

I'm sorry, but what did you think I meant there if not that?

Quote

more subjective nonsense.

This may be a question of semantics. Would you say that a tool that can do more things, more easily is more or less powerful than a tool that can do fewer things, less easily?


I'm going to make an assertion, which I think can be defended. The assertion is that a mouse-based graphical interface is relatively easy to get started with, but it is fundamentally limited and limiting relative to a command-based text interface. I am claiming that this is not a statement of opinion, but a statement of fact. A picture may convey a thousand words, but no two people get the same thousand words from a picture, or use the same thousand words to describe the picture. If you want to express a complex idea clearly and concisely, you use words. More generally, a vocabulary of words with syntax is more powerful and expressive than a vocabulary of arbitrary gestures, without syntax.*

Again, I don't consider this a matter of opinion, and it's clearly central to the issue, though it's not the whole of the issue. I think it's worth having a thrash at this limited part of the issue, to get down to cases and away from generalities.
I don't want to put this in the manner of a challenge, but more to frame a discussion more productive than the sort of reflexive disagreement for its own sake that this tends to devolve into. Might be interesting, and certainly less vituperative than some folks seem to prefer.


* sign language? Nice try, but linguistically, that's a vocabulary of words and syntax: the signs of the language are not arbitrary, and they combine in non-arbitrary ways to produce complex utterances

[The_Programmer-]

As long as there is syntax highlighting, I don't care. I prefer to use Eclipse because I can learn new methods just by putting a dot after a class object.

[lordofduct]

jon.kiparsky, on 04 April 2012 - 06:27 PM, said:

...

I'm going to make an assertion, which I think can be defended. The assertion is that a mouse-based graphical interface is relatively easy to get started with, but it is fundamentally limited and limiting relative to a command-based text interface. I am claiming that this is not a statement of opinion, but a statement of fact. A picture may convey a thousand words, but no two people get the same thousand words from a picture, or use the same thousand words to describe the picture. If you want to express a complex idea clearly and concisely, you use words. More generally, a vocabulary of words with syntax is more powerful and expressive than a vocabulary of arbitrary gestures, without syntax.*

...

And it's an assertion I don't agree with.

Especially if the thing you're attempting to do is graphical in nature.


It's good, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't render the graphical user interface inferior. And how did we get on graphical user interface? You were talking about IDEs... are you suggesting that the fact your tools are command based that THAT is what makes them so much better. Srsly... it's OPINION! Don't even try to think it's not.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 04 April 2012 - 05:06 PM

[jon.kiparsky]

Quote

And it's an assertion I don't agree with.

So, is it a question of fact?

Quote

Especially if the thing you're attempting to do is graphical in nature.

Well, we're talking about code, so I'd have thought it was obvious that I didn't need to bring that up. But since you mention it, okay, I'll grant you that drawing pictures - arbitrary visual gestures - is easier with a mouse-based interface. However, I think you'll find it's a lot easier to generate something like a mandelbrot set with a program in a written language than with a graphical interface. Likewise any basic geometric figure is going to be easier to generate algorithmically than by hand, I think. Thinking of text presentation as a matter of graphics, TeX generates beautiful layout without ever requiring a graphical interface, DocBook is pretty good at doing structured layout from plain text.

And what about graphs? A graph representing data is also typically easier to generate in a text-based interface, under any set of comparable assumptions aside from "drawing it freehand". If we assume the issue is to generate a graph from an existing data file using an exitsting program, it's not even a question: one line does the work while your GUI is still loading. If we're talking about entering the data, keypad input is a lot faster and more precise than anything mouse-based. To be faster with the mouse you have to reduce precision to the freehand level. If we're talking about writing a program to accept data in some form and present it graphically, I know I'd use a text-based language to do that.

So I think that your objection only holds for a limited subset of what we'd think of as the graphical, and it has little to do with the question at hand, which is to do with the manipulation of text.

[AVReidy]

They both have their pros and cons.

Text editors (the good ones, anyway) are nice because they tend to be more versatile than IDEs, and they are definitely easier to use and more practical when you just want to get some code down. When you open a text editor like Notepad++, you only have to click about twice before you begin coding in a nice syntax-highlighted environment. Basically, you can't beat a good text editor when you just want to write up some code without choosing a ton of options to get a project that you might not even want to save off the ground. The main setback to text editors, in my opinion, is that they lack what would classify them as IDEs, and these lacking qualifications are arguably necessary to programming productively on larger projects (in certain languages).

IDEs are nice for a lot of reasons. They are considered text editors, of course, meaning they do everything text editors do (except for highlighting in a million languages), but they also show you your errors and (if you're not a lightning fast typer) offer code completion. Being a noob, I actually find this combination helpful for learning a language and its libraries. One major downside to IDEs is that you generally have to go through a few options to set up a project, even if you just want to test out a little idea. Also, they are usually limited to support only a few languages.

Imagine an IDE as clean, simple, and uniform as Notepad++ with IDE capabilities for all the languages Notepad++ supports... I'd buy that.

[lordofduct]

jon.kiparsky, on 04 April 2012 - 07:26 PM, said:

Quote

And it's an assertion I don't agree with.

So, is it a question of fact?

It is fact that command shell is powerful. It is opinion that a graphical user interface is inferior to a command shell.

jon.kiparsky, on 04 April 2012 - 07:26 PM, said:

...snip

Well, we're talking about code, so I'd have thought it was obvious that I didn't need to bring that up.

...snip

Coding can still be graphical in nature. Game design for instance.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 05 April 2012 - 07:10 AM

[jon.kiparsky]

lordofduct, on 05 April 2012 - 09:05 AM, said:

It is fact that command shell is powerful. It is opinion that a graphical user interface is inferior to a command shell.

I agree that "inferior" would be a matter of opinion, but I didn't use the word, and I don't think it's a very useful one here. What would it mean? It sounds like it just means "not preferable". "Powerful" is susceptible to meaning. We might say that an interface is more powerful to the degree that it allows you to do more. Clearly, the shell as an environment is more powerful than the IDE, because anything that you can do on your computer can be executed from the shell, and this is not the case for an IDE.

Simple power is not determinative of preference. I prefer that an editor not be powerful - I don't want to launch a web browser from within my editor. Someone else might have different preferences, and that's why emacs exists. But since a development environment is just a device for calling tools, I think it's reasonable to rank "power" highly once you advance past the most basic beginner stages of programming.
If you accept that, that still doesn't mean that we're done with the notion of power. It's a typical geek mistake to fall into the numerical fallacy, if a thing is good, then more of it is better. This is usually incorrect: for most goods, there is a satiation point. For you an IDE might be sufficiently powerful for your needs. You might find that in using an IDE, you do not run into limits on what you can do, and that might be enough for you. Okay: if you're with me so far, we've established that a command line is a more powerful development environment, but that this isn't a concern for you.

So, are you beginning to see how there are things we can reasonably agree on about the different virtues of different sorts of interfaces or of different sorts of development environments? "That's just your opinion" is a cheap cop-out. Your final choice of tool is a matter of personal preference, but there are actual facts available when we're talking about interface design.


"Expressive" is another concept that can be meaningful. We might agree that an interface is more expressive if it allows transparent and flexible access to a program's functionality. The underlying notion is that a more expressive interface allows me to exercise a program's capabilities deeply and without getting in my way. Here, again, I think the syntax of the bash shell allows a degree of expressiveness that cannot be matched in a gesture-based interface, precisely because the syntax of the graphical interface is so limited. It would be interesting to try to develop a graphical interface with expressivity and syntax, but it doesn't exist yet, and it won't be a menu-based interface.


There are probably other virtues for an interface. On your side, you might bring up "learnability" and "discoverability". An GUI is typically more immediately discoverable than a CLI: you can sit down with it and start using it without instructions. "Learnable" is another matter. To me "learnable" implies an underlying regularity that is accessible to the user. A discoverable interface is one that I can get started with easily. A learnable interface is one for which I get a high leverage on what I discover about the interface. If you want your interface to talk back to you, we should coin a term for that virtue. Perhaps you'd call it "interactivity" or something. To me, it's a vice, but if you prefer that your IDE collaborate with you in writing your code, then this is something that a discussion of interfaces should include.

Quote

jon.kiparsky, on 04 April 2012 - 07:26 PM, said:

Well, we're talking about code, so I'd have thought it was obvious that I didn't need to bring that up.

Coding can still be graphical in nature. Game design for instance.

I really don't know what you want to be talking about here. Are the things you do in an IDE basically textual, or do you use an IDE to make the sprites and visuals for games as well?
Designing a visual element - making an icon or an avatar, drawing a background, any sort of freehand creation - is easiest in a graphical tool. No argument there, and I don't see how it's relevant to the question of whether a command-driven textual interface is inherently more expressive than a gesture-driven graphical one when it comes to writing code. It doesn't matter what the program does or what sort of objects it manipulates, what matters is how you make the program do what it does. Source code is basically text, regardless of what sorts of objects the text is about.

This post has been edited by jon.kiparsky: 05 April 2012 - 08:45 AM

[lordofduct]

it's a matter of being able to quickly jump between the code, and the graphical representation that results from said code.

I can have the scene of my videogame running in real time side by side with my code. I can manipulate the code through written code, or even visual modifiers (like slider bars, adjusting curvatures, etc) and see in real time the effects in my game.

This is something a purely command shell oriented place can not yield. I'm not suggesting text is bad... I'm suggesting a pure command shell (no gui at all) has many faults as well and isn't the end all be all to development.



See my probablem isn't that you find it more "powerful", "preferable", etc... preferable actually sums it up (you said the word after all). It's more preferable to you to use only a command shell. Good on ya... but it's an opinion... it's a PREFERENCE. That's my problem, you took your opinion/preference, and instead "asserted" it as "fact".

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 05 April 2012 - 08:54 AM

[jon.kiparsky]

So let me get this straight: you're a programmer, and you think there's nothing to think about in interface design besides stuff like "pink... I like pink"? It's all just preferences, and none of the decisions actually matter?

[lordofduct]

see because I don't agree with your side of the issue, thusly I must completely throw everything out the window.

False... I'm in the middle. I understand that command shells are powerful, but that gui's are powerful as well. And for the most part, in the realm of programming, there's not a whole lot more you can do that I can't. Especially considering that I can have an xterm window open while I'm programming so I can easily gain access through my gui the SAME EXACT things as you if I really feel I need it. Sounds to me like I get the best of both worlds...

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 05 April 2012 - 09:58 AM

[jon.kiparsky]

It sure seems like you're throwing a lot out the window. For example, the idea that there might be anything to say about a particular decision beyond "I prefer Brand X" seems to be going right past you. Again: I'm not talking about preferences, mine or yours or anyone's.

Quote

I'm in the middle. I understand that command shells are powerful, but that gui's are powerful as well.

So is this a grand bland undivided blancmange-like homogeneity? All interfaces are inherently equivalent, and therefore it's purely a matter of aribtrary preference? Or is it possible that they're powerful, expressive, discoverable, learnable, and so forth in different ways?
Is it possible that there is a point to interface design, and therefore that designs can be evaluated - not on the basis of brand loyalty, which is what we mostly see in this sort of argument, but in terms of the features that are interesting to the user?
If none of this is possible, as you seem to be asserting, then what would be the point of engaging in this conversation in the first place? If everything's the same as everything else (which you claim, but then occasionally retract) then why would you care enough to argue so vehemently?

Quote

Especially considering that I can have an xterm window open while I'm programming so I can easily gain access through my gui the SAME EXACT things as you if I really feel I need it. Sounds to me like I get the best of both worlds...

Hm. Most editors tend to get cranky or confused when you go around them to change a document in another context. Does this not cause a problem for you?

Be that as it may, to me this doesn't sound like the best of both worlds. It sounds like neither is giving you what you really want, which can hardly be considered the "best".

[lordofduct]

nope doesn't cause a problem for me... cause not all editors are the same and get whiny. See just like you need to KNOW how to use a command prompt and all the tools at your disposal, so do you need to know how to interact with your IDE... because it is software as well. You've learned to interact with your software, I learned to interact with my software.

What's not giving me the best of worlds? My operating system experience. That's what I started at, you accused IDEs of being a patch to a lacking operating system. And then supported this by saying your command shell and software suite gives you everything you need with out the gui front-end that you assert as fact that it is superior to any graphical experience. You assert this in a case of "power" and that it's not opinion. You then follow that by equating "power" to "preference"... which means opinion.

You have contradicted yourself the entire way. Merely to support your opinion, but trying to assert it as fact. I have NO PROBLEM your opinion that it is powerful, nor the facts you use to assert your opinion. But I assert that this does not make its power fact... it can be judged, but it's not fact.

Note I've only shown a preference for the several guis I use, as well as the command shells I've used. I can pin point what about them make them powerful (which I have listed several examples, and circumstances). What I haven't done... is assert that because they are powerful, that thusly they are the most powerful. This I have not done... this is what you have done, and this discussion has been about (for me).

I can judge that Van Gogh is a wonderful artist. I can describe every aspect/fact of his art and why that makes it great. This still does not assert itself as fact, and it doesn't assert itself as "the greatest". Monet is not relegated as inferior (for one to be the greatest, than all others are inferior) because I've described Van Gogh as a great artist. And in his time the very same measures I've used to define him as great were used to define him as awful.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 05 April 2012 - 10:28 AM

[jon.kiparsky]

I give up, it's hopeless. I guess this is just not one of your good reading comprehension days.

[codeMonkey_1066]

Currently what I use is the Netbeans IDE, but with the vi editor plugin.

As to why, the right tool for the the job.
An editor is great if all you need to do is edit a file, but programming is more than just that.

One of the big advantage an IDE can offer is the ease with witch one can navigate around code which is often spread around many files in disparate locations.

One of the common challenges faced by a programmer is to understand correct and modify existing code, often written by someone else ( this includes the you of several months/years ago ) and depressingly far too often not well or clearly written.
Having to devote metal resources navigating around the code can make understanding it a lot harder.

IDEs often have an up front cost in both learning how to use them, and there initial configuration
(The latter being reduced by the former ) but the payoff in long term ease, efficiency and productivity are well worth it.

Being Able to program without an IDE is useful, both for the times when you don't have access to your usual working environment and for the improved knowledge and understanding such skills bring.

In the end though it really boils down to what's easiest for you to use. Save you time and effort for the code you actually write rather than what you use to write it.