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Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-dat


From: Terje Bless
Subject: Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 03:09:44 +0200

Alfred M. Szmidt <address@hidden> wrote:

>* Michael Toomim writes:
>>Changing the terminology would help new users, and I think that old
>>users would be able to get used to the changes pretty quickly, since
>>they'd all be pretty intuitive (assuming they're just being updated to
>>the terms commonly used today).
>
>Seriously, changing the terminology just to help new users is to funny,
>if someone wants to learn about the terminology then they should read
>the dictionary (it actually exists to be read).  Just because someone
>doesn't understand what `esophagus' means, doesn't mean that the word
>should be changed to something that is more suitable to new people that
>are interested in biology.

This actually makes my point very well.

Since I'm not too find of analogies I won't delve into any long discussion
of jargon among peers vs. popular (or populist) science.

You choose your level of abstraction based on the vocabulary of your
audience. We aren't talking about people interested in "biology" here;
we're talking about a patient seeing a doctor. Talking about the
implementation and demanding familiarity with terminology is fine for
budding Emacs _developers_, but it's (IMO) inappropriate for people who
merely want to /use/ Emacs to perform some task. If my doctor told me I had
an inflamed pharynx I wouldn't know what the hell he was talking about. A
sore throat OTOH is perfectly understandable and is probably accurate
_enough_ under the circumstances.



-- 
>For all I know they probably have a standard for
>which direction to put the thread on a bolt.

That would be ISO 261:1973.         -- John Cowan




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