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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Replying to @sTeamTraen @richarddmorey and
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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Replying to @sTeamTraen @richarddmorey and
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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Replying to @sTeamTraen @richarddmorey and
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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Replying to @sTeamTraen @o_guest and
I would not claim that there is no place for GUIs; I like them for some things. But GUI *everything* is bad, and that's where we are.
@CandiceMorey has noticed that with SPSS, some students don't get the connection between the calculations they're doing and the numbers in SPSS. >2 replies 1 retweet 4 likes -
Replying to @richarddmorey @sTeamTraen and
"Doing stats" is computing means, etc, while SPSS is another (weird) thing. We take for granted even things about GUIs (even metaphors about "files" and "folders") that might not be obvious to our students, as the tech they interact with changes.
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Replying to @richarddmorey @sTeamTraen and
It seems very hard to me to teach statistics while avoiding elementary computing concepts like files and folders.
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Replying to @JPdeRuiter @richarddmorey and
It is! But lately, I've wondered whether the physical metaphor for space on computers is at all intuitive to new students. Newer tech hides this from the user. And they won't likely have experience with the physical things the metaphors are based on (literal file folders).
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Replying to @CandiceMorey @JPdeRuiter and
I look forward to the psychological theories that we will see from the next generation! ("memory is like the blockchain...")
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Replying to @richarddmorey @CandiceMorey and
I've definitely seen the 'memory is like a wikipedia page' analogy...
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Makes me think of this... Metaphors/symbols can die.pic.twitter.com/vz7LzmJ8DJ
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