Re: Programming language vote - results

[Robert Bernecky <bernecky@acm.org>]

James L. Ryan wrote:

> In article <34576752.11BAACA1@acm.org>, Robert Bernecky <bernecky@acm.org>
> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > ALL of the keyword schemes I saw (ALL of which differed from
> > vendor to vendor and even within a single vendor's products) had a
> > number of bad characteristics, such as:
> [snip]
>
> I can't comment on keyword schemes other than the one we implemented at
> Burroughs, but we did have correct caret placement on errors. (As an

I don't think I ever saw this in action. Sorry.

> I'm not sure what you mean by "difficulties with escape characters" or

Ability to read a text matrix containing one or more escape characters,
whencolumns were supposed to line up. Your scheme (adding blank columns)
could make a function display REALLY wide. The key here is that

> "user-centered design." I have no recollection of an escape character

Check http://www.ibm.com/ucd for a bit of stuff on user-centered
orhuman-centered design. Also, look at SIGCHI (Human-Computer Interaction)
Proceedings going back 10 years or so. UCD's fundamental precepts include
stuff like: you never design something right the first time, the designer is
NOT
the person who should make decisions about the usability of a design
[the designer is blind to its faults and will often blame the user instead of
the design. If you ever do usability testing (I mean formal  testing, not
shipping a beta off to a few people), you'll quickly find the major holes
in your design, when you see 4 out of 5 users making EXACTLY the same
errors.], use of ergonomic measures such as Fitt's Law [Failure to observe
this is why the Windows up/down scrollbutton placement is so frustrating.]
and so on. I'd like to see someone fund an APL usability study. I'll
bet the language design would dramatically improve within weeks.

> problem when using an ASCII terminal with Burroughs APL. Given that at the

You are not a normal user, being bright, totally familiar with the product,and
[bad bad bad] a designer of it.

> time APL was accessed solely through hard-copy terminals, I feel that the
> input and editing conventions implemented by Burroughs were a cut above
> those implemented with APL/360. And given that the use of a special

 Your crew did some very nice design work.  Generally, elegant and
  clean, well-thought-out ideas.

Of course, with regard to your comment on Burroughs APL vs APL\360:

      "One of the problems of being a pioneer is that you always make
        mistakes, and I never, never want to be a pioneeer. It's always best
        to come second when you can look at the mistakes the
        pioneers made."
              Seymour Cray, LLNL CRAY-1 Introduction Lecture (1976).

Bob