Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Huge wrote:

On 2012-04-16, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
John Rumm wrote:


Obviously anything that is pragmatically useful and written by
engineers
to actually write real life code on is useless for academics who
don't
want to sully their hands with the real world,
Although you have to admit, that if said engineers had had
decent interactive terminals with screen editors etc, they may not
have insisted on something quit as concise and dependent on using
every printable character in the ASCII set for something! ;-)

Not sure about that. Remember, these are the ****ers that gave us
TECO. And two-character unix commands.

I think describing them as "****ers" is a little strong. Such
language should
be reserved for those, er, ****ers in Redmond.

From time to time I get dopey enough to think that I ought to learn the
ins and outs of unix - environment variables, shell scripting, edlin,
emacs, etc etc.


I don't use any of those.

script is for monkeys who cant write C :-)

Every time I try a regexp it blows up on me and I write some C code that
does EXACTLY what I want, not what some **** decided would be useful for
me to do.

I program with a PROPER editor (Geany) in C and PHP.
Or write docs in Open Office.

After five minutes (or twenty [1] if I had been fool enough to start
emacs), I feel like throwing the computer out of the window. Then I'm
sane again until the next time. Luckily these episodes are becoming
rarer as I get older.

[1] actually it's five minutes in all cases, it's just that it takes an
extra fifteen minutes to figure out how to quit emacs.


well exactly.

The beauty of - say - a modern Gnome GUI is it behaves pretty much like
windows XXP except its faster and never crashes. Geekls may sniff at
that, bit I find it makes things easier.

Click on an editor icon, there's an editor. Nuff said.

I admit to occasionally using vi to edit root level files, but thats cos
I HAD to learn it as the ONLY editor that was ALWAYS present on ANY *nix
system.

And I avoid editing root level files except as a last resort.

The fact is you can install linux and get networking browsing email
office (word/calc/powerpoint) plus a media player that will play DVDS
all as a standard issue distro without ever having to edit anything at all.

And if that is your basic toolkit, there's no need top step outside the GUI.


--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.