[MUD-Dev] Clients

[coder at ibm.net]

On 12/02/98 at 10:45 AM, Mike Sellers <mike at online-alchemy.com> said: >At
10:08 PM 2/11/98 PST8PDT, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote: 

>Is this humor?  This is a pretty easily refuted assertion (if anything
>the IQ of the average US adult has risen slightly in the past 20-30
>years).  

This is a tough one to define given the poor state of the definition of
IQ, how to measure it, and what relevance its attempted measurement has to
its definition.  There is also significant question on the validity of
there being one universally applicable definition of intelligence as vs
several definitions each of which applies partially and to different
extents to each individual.

Note for starters how dependant IQ tests are on education and (often)
cultural assumptions.

>I think Jon's last statement above is to the point: it's not that the
>average IQ has gone down, it's more the case that the average
>geek-quotient of people on the Net has gone down dramatically in the past
>few years, and will continue to do so.  With this, their tolerance for
>obscure interfaces goes down, and the demand for clearer, more usable
>interfaces goes up.  

There's an implicit assumption in there that an interface which is more
readily understandable and usable without aforethought or education is
necessarily better.  I question this with the case of language itself
being my best example.

The command line is an obscure and austere interface, useless without
education (training), and forethough (needed to assemble the command prior
to entry).  It is also powerful and capable of fluently stating processes
which are difficult if not impossible to state in a general purpose
graphical environ.  Are GUI's necessarily better?  Or do they merely
present a lower inital learning curve?  How valuable in an absolute sense
(I'm not talking marketing here) is that initial lower learning curve? 
How important is the lack of a matching learning curve (due to missing
functionality) at the upper end?

The CLI is not a holy mandate.  GUI's ala WIMP's are certainly not an
ultimate answer or anthing even remotely close.  What is?  Why?

I strongly recommend anyone intersted in this area investigate IBM's
Visual Age products.  Their visual builder concept (which has no parallel
or equivalent in the MS/Borland/Symantec world) does a lot to narrow the
functional gap between CLI and WIMP GUI.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...