[ge-talk] (no subject)

[Ari Haviv]

On 1/15/07, Paul van Nugteren <pmvannugteren at eml.cc> wrote:

> The basic problem I see is this; if you sit down and have a shell in
> front of you and you know nothing about commands or whatever you can do
> what do you do? Remember when you were a kid and the first time you had
> a shell in front of you and you said "bloody stupid moron" meaning the
> computer "do something!" and it replied; "syntax error" WOW! That was
> usefull info! And it sure made you want to use that computer more! (not)
>

Like I pointed out before, it should be like learning javascript on
the web. You see some examples and you gradually pick it up. Who
learned it just from reading a book? But it only works if the language
is widespread, consistent, simple and english based.Vms dcl,
Applescript and rebol could be good as models.

<superoptimistic mode>ideally ideally ideally the whole scripting
language should be localizable so that instead of typing "if" you'd
type in the equivalent in your own language. Examples would be
"babelized"
Why should you have to know english in order to use a computer? </mode>

> Now I bet a lot of you know, use or have used emacs. In my emacs I have
> here, I have a function  "emacs psychiater", I tried that once, and it
> was great fun until I had to do something useful. Imagine being a kid
> again and you sit in front of the computer and you type in a question, a
> silly thing like "hello how are you I want to do something fun!" And the
> computer replies "I'm fine, how are you? And what is fun for you? Or
> something like that, I'm sure you'd go Wow! it can talk! Now imagine
> your grandmother and she types down, "internet" and the computer would
> reply "internet?" Here or some suggestions: you want to browse the
> interenet? You want to communicate with someone? Looking for infor? Or
> can you specify that more? Type internet and then some verb. etc etc.
>

Well if you are talking about kids and grandma...i don't think they
will download Haiku iso, burn a cd, defrag the hard drive, resize a
partition and install it.

That's probably a bigger problem than a nice script/command language

> The problem I'm getting at is not such one as an AI system but more a
> question like, "I want to do something, but I don't now which tools will
> do that for me" I want to rename some files, sent an email, make some
> music but I haven't got the slightest idea that I'd really like to type
> mv, thunderbird &, garageband (that's why I'd like to have a description
> together with a name in eg. deskbar/apps so you don't end up with VLC
> but VLC dvdplayer, music player or just player.

Well, most people would agree that if you want to rename something
you'd type in "rename" instead of "mv" or "$.?$%$$^//!"
i think if you want to search for audio apps you would search the mime
filetype database