[sugar] Education?

[Don Hopkins]

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> [...] If anything is an anathema, then it's the huge body of 
> impenetrable C code in linux, the libraries, X11, gecko, gtk, cairo, 
> and, yes, underlying Python, too, and even Squeak, though to a much 
> lesser extent. This prevents opening the hood, seeing how things work, 
> modifying it, constructing new things etc. *This* is against the OLPC 
> philosophy, which explicitly encourages constructionist learning.
If you're going to flame, can't you do any better than that? ;-)

Sure there are lessons to be learned from the mistakes of the past, and 
we're forced to use software that sucks because there's currently no 
better alternative, but you should be more specific and suggest better 
alternatives when you complain about what's wrong, if you want to 
advance the state of the art!

    -Don

PS: Here are some examples of old constructive flames that I hope 
inspire people to fix problems instead of deciding to feel offended.

========

X-Windows:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html

[...]

X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of 
political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just 
plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years 
of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit 
of gargantuan proportions. Divisive dependencies, distributed deadlocks, 
and partisan protocols have tightened gridlocks, aggravated race 
conditions, and promulgated double standards.

X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats -- like Sun's Open Look clock 
tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed 
all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn't have 
enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 "xclock" utility 
consumed 656K to run. And X's memory usage is increasing.

[...]

========

Sun Desktop Environment:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/deskset.html

[...]

PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out that even your 
example of dropping a mail message on CM doesn't work if CM is closed. 
That's a symptom of the kind of arrogance that all the deskset tools 
seem to show - they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres 
of screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do their job 
efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have to shove their bells 
and whistles in my face all the time? They're like 50's American cars - 
huge and covered with fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, 
efficient, elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may 
look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools screaming 
at them for attention all the time? It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein 
painting on your bedroom wall.

[...]

========

SGI Irix "Software Usability II" Memo:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html

[...]

The following, which claims to be an internal Silicon Graphics memo, has 
already seen fairly broad network distribution. I have no way of 
verifying that it is what it claims to be, but (a) I'm told by someone 
with close dealings with SGI that it fits with what he's heard; (b) if 
it's a fake, someone put a huge amount of effort into producing it.

I forward it to RISKS as a wonderful record of what goes wrong with 
large software projects, and why. It would be as useful if all the 
names, including the company and product names, were removed. This memo 
should not be seen as an indictment of SGI, which is hardly unique. 
There is good evidence that Sun, for example, had very similar problems 
in producing Solaris; and I watched the same thing happen with the late, 
unlamented DEC Professional series of PC's, and something like it almost 
happen with firmware for DEC terminals a number of years back.

I hope that Tom Davis's position hasn't been badly hurt by the broad 
distribution of his memo - but based on the traditional reaction to 
bearers of bad news, especially when the bad news becomes widely known, 
I can't say I'm sanguine about it. -- Jerry

[...]

========

IRIX 6.x Audio Panel

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/audio-panel.html

[...]

Oh please, could the new SGI audio panel possibly be more overengineered 
and awkward? It's like this weird Frankenstein panel with strange 
prosthetic limbs protruding from every orifice, hindering basic bodily 
functions like breathing and eating and watching TV.

What's up with the whole "multiple widget-laden panels in a subwindow 
with a scrollbar so you can scroll around between the panels because the 
main window isn't big enough" cuteness? Why do people think this is so 
cool? It's like the audio balance widgets are a little document! I 
though the old "MultiTrack" program was supplied by SGI as a proof that 
this kind of user interface metaphor was mistake and should not be repeated.

[...]

========

Jojo on UI:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-on-ui.html

[...]

XBorges.

One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers 
falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are 
provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an 
open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting 
upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding 
them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant 
retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users 
before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They 
have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely 
traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate 
(open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky 
and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to 
closed-form solutions.

    * Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.

[...]

========

Window Manager Flames

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.html

[...]

The ICCCM, abbreviated I39L, sucks. I39L is a hash for the acronymic 
expansion of ICCCM for "Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual". 
Please read it if you don't believe me that it sucks! It really does. 
However, we must live with it. But how???

[...]

Bill Buxton put it well: it is an unworthy design objective to aim for 
anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did 
to the previous state of the art.

[...]

========

Motif Angst Page

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html

[...]

/*
 *    This is a horrible function which should not be needed.
 *    use it to put the resize method back the way the XlwMenu
 *    class initializer put it. Motif screws with this when
 *    the XlwMenu class gets instantiated.
 */

[...]

========

Using XBugTool to File a Bug Report Against Itself

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugtool.html

[...]

 Synopsis: I have no mouse motion and my input focus is stuck in xbugtool!!!
 Keywords: I have no mouth and I must scream [Harlan Ellison]
 Severity: 1
 Priority: 1
 Description:
This is my worst nightmare! None of my TNT or XView applications are
getting any mouse motion events, just clicks. And my input focus is
stuck in xbugtool, of all places!!!  When I click in cmdtool, it gets
sucked back into xbugtool when I release the button! And I'm *not* using
click-to-type! I can make selections from menus (tnt, olwm, and xview) if
I click them up instead of dragging, but nobody's receiving any mouse
motion!

I just started up a fresh server, ran two jets and a cmdtool, fired up
a bugtool from one of the jets (so input focus must have been working
then), and after xbugtool had throbbed and grunted around for a while
and finally put up its big dumb busy window, I first noticed something
was wrong when I could not drag windows around!

Lucky thing my input focus ended up stuck in xbugtool!

The scrollbar does not warp my cursor either... I can switch the input focus
to any of xbugtool's windows, but I can't   ... -- oomph errrgh aaaaahhh!
There, yes!

Aaaaah! What a relief! It stopped! I can move my mouse again!!
Hurray!!!  It started working when I opened a "jet" window, found I
could type into *it*, so I moved the mouse around, the cursor
disappeared, I typed, there were a couple of beeps, I still couldn't
find the cursor, so I hit the "Open" key, the jet closed to an icon,
and I could type to xbugtool again! And lo and behold now I can type
into the cmdtool, *too*! Just by moving my cursor into it! What a
technological wonder! Now I can start filing bug reports against
cmdtool, which was the only reason I had the damn thing on my screen in
the first place!!! I am amazed at the way the window system seems to
read my mind and predict my every move, seeming to carry out elaborate
practical jokes to prevent me from filing bugs against it. I had no
idea the Open Windows desktop had such sophisticated and well
integrated interclient communication!

[...]

========

Worst Job in the World

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-job.html

[...]

I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix 
system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell.

[...]

But there are many who must dwell in this miasma both day and night. 
What makes my friend's job so ugly is that he doesn't only work with 
just any strain of Unix -- he works with Solaris. And he doesn't just 
deal with just any braindead users -- his users are the executives at 
Sun Microsystems.

Let me tell you about Sun Microsystems. At Sun, there's a long history 
of executives playing pranks on one another. For April Fools, these 
rowdies would play tricks like putting a golf course (complete with 
putting green) in Scott McNealy's office, or floating Bill Joy's Ferrari 
in one of the landscaped ponds. Things have come a long way since then. 
Now every day is April Fools, and my friend doesn't like it one bit.

[...]

========

Preface to the Unix-Haters Handbook

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/preface.html

[...]

"I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an 
undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your 
body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer 
from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can 
tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By 
the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think 
that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act."

Ken Pier, Xerox PARC

[...]

Who We Are

We are academics, hackers, and professionals. None of us were born in 
the computing analog of Ken Pier's East Africa. We have all experienced 
much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or 
ever can be. Some of these systems have increasingly forgotten names, 
such as TOPS-20, ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System), Multics, 
Apollo Domain, the Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, and the Dorado. Some of us 
even use Macs and Windows boxes. Many of us are highly proficient 
programmers who have served our time trying to practice our craft upon 
Unix systems. It's tempting to write us off as envious malcontents, 
romantic keepers of memories of systems put to pasture by the commercial 
success of Unix, but it would be an error to do so: our judgments are 
keen, our sense of the possible pure, and our outrage authentic. We seek 
progress, not the reestablishment of ancient relics.

[...]

========