I've heard others say that skeptics of teaching R just need to see Glasgow UG students at posters to be convinced that it is possible.
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"ok, now highlight the verb 'go', then 'Insert -> Prepositional Phrase -> Direction -> To'; in the new box, type 'store' as the object, and tick the 'add definite article' box. Then highlight the entire sentence, click Format Sentence Type from the ribbon, choose 'Question'..."
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Perhaps the appeal is that all of those words on the menus are normal English words. I think there may have been a reaction to CLIs, especially Unix-style ones (ls, chmod, etc), as requiring you to "memorise a lot of jargon", "speak like a geek", etc.
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That reminds me of when my kids learned judo. The names of the moves are inherently unambiguous to a non-Japanese speaker, but as far as I can tell they are fairly dull phrases in Japanese. Maybe "obscure" jargon is in fact easier to learn. Do we need a cognitive linguist here?
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In defence of GUIs, though, I suspect they may fit better in truly event-driven programming worlds. CLIs tend to come from the tradition of "execution starts at the top, falls slowly through to the bottom with maybe some loops on the way" (like scripting).
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Having actually written a chess program on a Mac circa 1988, using the Mac API in Pascal with everything being driven by events, I can't imagine what that would look like with a CLI. And we do mostly recommend RStudio to go along with R (although I wouldn't recommend RCommander).
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There's a lot of concepts getting mixed up here. As I said somewhere above. Rote learning is not all bad because some rote learning generalises. Multiplication tables for example are rote and generalise. Menus for stats or coding? Not as much.
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This is all in my blog post so I'll stop and focus on finishing it.
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Probably OT for your upcoming post, but the present discussion did remind me of a favourite trope: https://blog.codinghorror.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-developers-create-ui/ … or https://jcooney.net/archive/2006/10/30/36235.html … via/by
@codinghorror &@josephcooney As a full-stack dev, I have to constantly prevent myself from recreating "the Dialog", ugh. - 3 more replies
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There's definitely a tipping point where they become unfriendly - simple GUIs like a text editor or a Web browser are fine. But sometimes I have to use Inkscape and well...pic.twitter.com/v1YirwOXvb
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INKSCAPE! /raises fist to the heavens, screaming curses at the gods
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A Menu system that is well-designed (most aren’t) and kept simple (most aren’t) can be very useful for *occasional* users who do not have ready access in their memory to commands & syntax. Psych students should not be *occasional* users of stats.
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A menu system is only one type of GUI. GUIs that are purpose designed to match the process being performed can be very useful - as a visual analogue. Visual data flow languages like LabVIEW are an excellent example. Menu systems, on the other hand, are simply lookup lists.
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