Re: "is ada dead?" A challenge for all of us?

[Al Christians <achrist@easystreet.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> if all the gold lies burried that deep, I'd blame the tool for 
> that - not me. If what it has is so spiffy, howcum it isn't 
> immediately  visible?
> 

If you want to produce a product that stands tall in comparison to 
products produced by <big software company, but I won't mention any
names>,  realize that they have human factors experts who help them
reduce (or increase) the dumbth of their user interfaces to match
user expectations and increase user satisfaction (no fooling).  I
don't want to complain about emacs or any other particular piece of
open software, because it is extraordinary that such wonderful things
are freely available, but I somehow get the idea that maybe emacs, 
etc, weren't designed with human factors suited to the average person 
according to the experts foremost.      

There are many more things besides programming language that determine 
whether or not software meets its objectives.  One of these is human 
factors of the UI.  If you are not an expert in this area, you probably 
can't estimate accurately the percent of otherwise users lost on 
account of the UI if you build and  emacs-like interface --  0%, 1%, 
10%, 50%, or 99%? I surely DK. 

Presumably, with good software, this is all user-configurable.  But
it is daunting to a new user to try to reconfigure emacs, and this is
not something that a product that is aimed at drawing new users should
count on.  To gain a big number of new users, I'd guess you've got to 
have a standard Windows look and feel either standard or not more than 
2.5 clicks away from the default set up. I have seen an emacs setup 
that actually has hot keys on the pull down menus and responds to the 
Windows standard control keys for cut and paste, etc.  Could one 
combine that kind of setup into the Ada mode for emacs? 

If someone could write a program that would get all the emacs haters
to like emacs,  I'd nominate them for the Nobel Peace Prize.


Al