[9fans] samuel

[Alex Danilo <alex@ishtek.com>]

>If you just prefer GUIs to composition of commands, just say so.

I don't prefer GUIs.  What does sam itself do - provide a GUI
where grep, find, ed, and sed would have worked just fine:-)

Rob states:

>make grandiose philosophical statements about it.  Well, I have tried
>samuel and I didn't like it, partly because it didn't seem to help all
>that much (because grep could do a lot of the work for you just fine);
>partly because added a set of special-purpose features rather than a
>general-purpose approach; partly because it cluttered up the menus to
>have that extra functionality, making it less useful as an editor; and
>partly because it just wasn't very well done.

The last point is the correct one.  It was badly done, but it was an
experiment.  I quote myself:

>The whole point of samuel was an experiment in application development
>environments.  Nothing more.

Rob:
>You won't get me to say I don't like tools and don't want to add to
>the the toolkit.  I will say, however, that I demand the tools be good
>and that they should increase the set of problems to be solved or
>significantly increase the ease with which they can be solved.

True - most of samuel was junk - the interpreter didn't work, the
advisor was ill-advised.  But the browser (one whole extra menu entry,
gee) added a wonderful code navigation tool.  'grep' can't parse and
so arguing that layout is a substitute for the language aware cscope
is _really_ misguided.  Heck, what are most of you coding in anyway?
Limbo and C probably.  Not much has changed since the 70's huh!

The point of my post is that as supposedly intelligent beings we should
apply that to make everyones job easier.  If you can get "90% of the
functionality with grep" and you're happy with that - then fine.

But, if you insist on building systems which require an IQ of more
than 100 to operate, then by definition you are excluding more
than 1/2 of the world's population from using the system.

>Samuel didn't make the grade.  If it had, I think it would still be
>around.

Well it is, you just have to know where.

Alex