(Re:)^50 Use of ``vi'' for business office word-processing

[guy at sun.UUCP]

In article <NNN at host.domain>, First M. I. Last writes:

> ... at site X, the secretaries had no trouble learning "vi", "eqn",
> "troff", ...

The fact that somebody *can*, without too much difficulty, learn to use tool
X to perform task Y does *not* imply that tool X is the most appropriate
tool for task Y, even if it's not much more dificult than using tool Z.  A
user, technical or not, may be more productive preparing documents with tool
Z rather than tool X, regardless of the relative difficulties of using tools
X and Z.

It sometimes seems that the ease or difficulty of using some tool correlates
far strongly with how familiar you are with that tool than with some
"objective" measure of ease of use.  Person X finds "vi" more useful than
"emacs" because they're more familiar with it and their brain has become
accustomed to its peculiarities.  This does not, in any way, mean "vi" is
better than "emacs"; for any choice of tools X and Z for which somebody
asserts that they find X "better" than Z, you can almost certainly find
somebody else who finds Z better than X.

The only conclusion you can draw from this is that both statements "X is
always better than Z" and "Z is always better than X" are false, since you
have now found at least one counterexample to the claims made by each of
those statements.

As such, we can now conclude that the claims that:

	1) non-technical users can't productively use "vi" and "nroff"

	2) "vi" and "nroff" are objectively better than WYSIWYG systems

are both false.  It seems the only knowledge we've gained is 1) that no
blanket statement about the merits of various approaches to word processing
is true and 2) there are specific things that the various approaches to WP
excel in.  If nobody has anything to add that teaches us anything *new*,
rather than merely providing further confirming instances in support of what
(as stated here) we already know, further discussion seems pointless.

(This debate has also included arguments about the relative merits of
single-user and multi-user systems, and of UNIX systems vs. IBM PCs running
MS-DOS vs. Macintoshes vs. Amigas vs..., none of which are germane to the
original quesion, which concerned the relative merits of "vi", "nroff", and
company vs. various WYSIWYG packages.  You can get non-formatting editors
and non-editing formatters for the IBM PC - you can even get "vi" for the
IBM PC, I think - and you can get WYSIWYG editors for UNIX.)
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)