On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:56 PM, Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Most people are unaware that life *even* exists beyond the > "point and click". Heck, If you opened a command prompt in > front of them, they'd run and hide in a closet for the next > three hours consumed with fear. They'd probably convince > themselves that "cryptic commands" in a "black window" could > be nothing less than sorcery -- and that's usually when the > pitchforks come out.
[citation needed] > Chris, it's obvious you need to climb down from the tower > and mingle with the peasants a bit -- don't worry, we'll > delouse you when you get back ;-) My mother used to be the sort who didn't even use computers if she didn't have to. Now, she happily uses Debian Wheezy on her laptop, and if I ask her to pull up a terminal and type something, she knows how to do that. Stephanie Gibson is a soprano from the operatic society I work with. She uses a Mac, probably the strongest "use a GUI not a terminal" system in popular use today. And when she had networking issues, I was able to show her how to pull up a terminal, and she handled it just fine - to the point of grokking how to skim the output of ifconfig for the pertinent bits, without even being instructed. I have worked with innumerable people. Never yet have I found a single one who ran away in fear, pulled out pitchforks, or anything of the sort. Yes, there are plenty of people who don't like to memorize commands (my former boss thought that all command-line UIs are by definition cryptic, I think because he came across a few poorly-documented ones), but very few who can't accept dictation - and much more easily than mouse clicks can be dictated. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
