Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] learning curves for text editors

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Jonathan King wrote:

> Oddly enough, I think all sides of the great religious war that concerns 
> text editing can agree with these theoretical results:
>
> http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/curves.jpg
>
> I guess this has been around for some time, but I've never seen it...


Funny.  Now here's a question for you:  What goes on the two axes of a 
"learning curve?"  It seems to me that it should be time on the abscissa 
and "amount learned" or "knowledge" or "ability" or somesuch on the 
ordinate.  So when someone refers to a "steep learning curve" they ought 
to mean that one will learn quickly, but that is rarely what people mean 
these days.  I think they believe that if a curve is steep it will require 
more effort, like climbing a steep hill.

So these funny graphs seems to say that one will immediately master all 
there is to master in vi.  Doesn't that mean that vi is very easy to use 
but it doesn't do very much?  I don't think that's accurate!  The learning 
curve for Notepad is about right - it doesn't do anything.  Pico is like 
that too, but you can master Pico almost immediately (but I recommend nano 
instead -- you should probably remove pico from your system and symlink 
pico -> nano).  Emacs is the funny one because I think it does tend to 
encircle the user until he finally is trapped inside of it forever, but 
that might be a good thing.  Visual Studio is new to me.  I don't even 
know what it is.

Mike

_______________________________________________
discussion mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion