This remind me of a discussion a very long time ago on a newsgroup

- a young zealot of GUI (windows, buttons, mouses) was asking himself and the community how people could deny that this was the best interface on earth or how anybody could prefer text based interface

- a seasonned sys. admin then started to explain all the clicks he had to perform to create one new user account. Result: for one new user some minutes of work
He then added that he had to create HUMDREDS of user every year and was so very happy that he did not had to do it all by pointing and clicking but had some scripts to do it.

So the answer to all this is that there are very good and valid reasons to prefer text to all the shiny interfaces of he world.
And you don't even have to look very far to find some.

As for programming with in a graphical way, the ability has been around for decades.
I believe we can safely assume that if people are still using textual interface after such a very long period (in computer science time frame), it is most certainly because natural selection has favoured the choice that had most advantages ...

nicolas

PS: which does not mean that GUI are completely useless

On 21/04/2015 20:03, kilon alios wrote:
Funnily enough I am in the exact opposite opinion, of Graphical approach being vastly superior to text based approach including programming languages. 25 years using computers and coding with them and still cannot fathom why programming languages are still a think and why developers and "power" users rely so much on text based approach. But whether I like it or not the coding world is dominated by text based solutions.

Its a pointless debate though when it comes to pharo will depend on the people doing the work. Personally I don't have the time of going very deep into this and doing all the hard work it requires. My focus is elsewhere. But I welcome any contribution.

As a lawyer myself and a coder, I cannot even begin to compare Latex to the convenience of Libreoffice I use at work. Its not even a debate .�� Latex is something I never heard of until�� Pillar introduced me to it. Can't imagine who in the right mind would use this to document things, but I guess they have their reasons.

I started with command line and CP/M back in 1988 but even back then when GUIs were not mainstream (at least in my country) I was dreaming of graphical intefaces that would lift me from the restrictions of text based approach and the dreaded command line. I wish I had found out about Smalltalk back then and its elegant solution to this problem. ��

I love Pillar because its simple and I like the syntax, but yeah in the end I would choose a Graphical Documentation Tool no questions asked.

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:39 PM, Dmitri Zagidulin <dmitri@zagidulin.net> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 12:15 PM, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:
I dream that all documents in my Dynabook are WYSIWYG. However, the
computing world seems to have regressed into writing documents in various
forms of assembly code.
Completely disagree, that it's a regression in any way :) ��Text-based document writing has enabled so many more features than WYSIWYG approaches have ever dreamed of. I would be happy to debate the merits of the two approaches, feature-for-feature.

You're basically pining for the equivalent of VisualBasic drag & drop programming, versus the flexibility of writing code in an editor. The latter wins, no contest. (Now, that is not to say that text-based code editing can't be /improved/ with better IDE tools, that's what we're all about after all.)
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