In terms of business programs, much of the apparent difficulty arises because business requires new programs to fit in with established work practices (which is sensible) however the code engine that does the work is often fairly simple and almost standard, where things blow out is in the human interface.
Doing GUIs in source code is a lengthy and frustrating process. Some 70% of actual programing is devoted to no more than the interface (very little to the guts in otherwords). In this developers and the computer industry do not want change (it is the 70% of time spent which renders the bucks), yet technically there is no reason for the GUI to either take this long or indeed to be source coded in the first place. It is a case of the relations of production coming into conflict with productive powers.
In short I very much agree with your description below of business and computers as an expensive, irrational mess.
For example see MAID http://www.lestec.com.au here the GUI is separaetd from the guts, can be easily changed on the fly and endlessly finetuned without expert programmer interference. It has been met with stony silence from developers.
On UNIX, I agree in essence that UNIX is a simple and sensible apporach, however, the difficulty derives from the underlying simplicity (at least from the perspective of ordinary users. X-windows is only loosely fixed to the underlying system, and the masses of small programs, separate modes of use (pure command-line - pure GUI, language dependancies etc) is extremely confusing. UNIX grows like topsy, which is is its real strength, it has immense source code flexibility and multiple methods for doing the same thing or related things - all assets under certain conditions, but the one thing it does not have is elegance (that is from the perspective of the garden variety of user).
Elegance of overall design is what leads a user naturally from one part of the system to another, encourages them to experiment and most of all because of consistancy allows them to forget some of the things they previous learnt to re-learn them again without taking much time out. In Unix, regular use soon makes it second nature, but consider someone who is picking over a variety of things and may not use anything very regularily - then the chaos of UNIX becomes a very big burden and one of the main reasons ordinary folks shy away from it as a whole.
I agree with you therefore in the main with what you say about UNIX and complexities of the machine interface, but I would add the above as even a more critical problem and one not resolvable by UNIX and its evolution (imposing elegance on it through a front-end is possible but I think not probable).
Chuck I do not expect a reply soon to these points (which are in any case more additive than debating points), but I do think that problems of socialist computing need to be seriously addressed and as you suggest it is something which will continue to bubble up.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia
--- Message Received --- From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 09:00:01 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: pull-down menus I sure don't disagree with any of this. But, from my very limited experience in programming (from long ago) I would say that designing systems for business is extremely complex. The main reason is that every business has evolved their own way of doing business and is absolutely fixed on the peculiarities of their methods and proceedures in the utterly false and arrogant belief that it is the best and only direction. This forces design to contort and twist itself in what most often amounts to silly, archane, and thoroughly irrational configurations. Added to this is the absurd meglomanic need of management to control every detail, particularly the interface. This adds tremendous bulk. The combination makes a system close to a useless nightmare of complexity---in other words a typical M$uck OS and application suite.
Sorry, I digress. Your post deserves a better response, but I am tied up with other things at the moment.
Let me say that much of the apparent difficulty of learning to use a unix system is due to its dependence on understanding how the computer and its components work, rather than any particular obscurity or subtlety in unix. What seems obscure in most cases is the nature of the underlying hardware or firmware. I think you alude to this, or it is implied in the last sentence.
Anyway, this is a kind of on-going thread that comes up now and then, so we can revisit it later. Gotta go.
Chuck Grimes