I find "powerful" GUIs confusing and frazzling to be honest. It's a visual maze with no clear path.
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Replying to @owainkenway @richarddmorey and
Same here. I hate thinking the GUI way. As if the actions one can take are set in linear order. Computer programing is in this sense like writing natural language. Imagine doing an essay using a menu and thinking that's normal.
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Replying to @o_guest @owainkenway and
"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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Replying to @richarddmorey @o_guest and
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 @o_guest and
I think there is a case to be made that SPSS makes it possible for people to pass their stats courses without having a clue what the numbers mean. Whether universal adoption of R would fix that, I don't know. Maybe they would get a friend to do the programming. TurnItIn for code?
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Replying to @sTeamTraen @richarddmorey and
I dunno if there’s a more general service but back in the early 00s when I was an undergrad the edinburgh cs dept had something like that.
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I never created so I don't know. But others in my compsci degree really did. We were all so competitive that I don't think they would have told me of they got penalised or even caught. The worst were those who wrote and shared/sold unit tests.
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