Blast from the Past

Another in a continuing series...

Microcomputer(as PCs were called before the IBM PC) veterans of a certain vintage well remember that most counterintuitively productive of productivity tools, WordStar 3.3 (and earlier). The hegemon of its day, WordStar used what at first (and usually fifth) inspection appeared to be whimsical, arbitrary key combinations for commands. Ctrl K-H for Help was invariably what new users first memorised. All through the 1980s and well beyond, any word-processing software that came onto the market had some degree of WordStar-compatible commands, either as their main command set or as a bolt-on to wean folks onto the "new" way of doing things. This was even true for the first several releases of WordPerfect and of Microsoft Word. (Word today has several available add-ons to add WordStar command compatibility.)

Why was this so popular? As noted in the Wikipedia article:

...the "diamond" of Ctrl-S/E/D/X moved the cursors one character or line to the left, up, right, or down. Ctrl-A/F (to the outside of the "diamond") moved the cursor a full word left/right, and Ctrl-R/C (just "past" the Ctrl keys for up and down) scrolled a full page up/down. Prefacing these keystrokes with Ctrl-Q generally expanded their action, moving the cursor to the end/beginning of the line, end/beginning of the document, etc. Ctrl-H would backspace and delete. Commands to enable bold or italics, printing, blocking text to copy or delete, saving or retrieving files from disk, etc. were typically a short sequence of keystrokes, such as Ctrl-P-B for bold, or Ctrl-K-S to save a file. Formatting codes would appear on screen, such ^B for bold, ^Y for italics, and ^S for underscoring.

Although many of these keystroke sequences were far from self-evident, they tended to lend themselves to mnemonic devices (e.g., Ctrl-Print-Bold, Ctrl-blocK-Save), and regular users quickly learned them through muscle memory, enabling them to rapidly navigate documents by touch, rather than memorizing "Ctrl-S = cursor left."

Why is this relevant (or even interesting) today? Besides the lessons to be learnt about interface design, it's interesting to note how many editors out there still pay homage to WordStar. I stumbled across joe again this morning; it's available on essentially all Linux and BSD distributions, with versions built for other systems as well (e.g., Mac OS X and Cygwin/Windows), and source freely available if your platform isn't yet supported or you just like to tinker around on one that is.

What makes this fairly scary for us old-timers is just how quickly the old finger habits come back. If you had more than a year's experience beating your head against the original WordStar, I dare you to work with joe or its ilk for more than a few minutes before "how do I do...?" completely falls away from your thoughts and you're just typing as fast as you can think.

For that's the real beauty of this type of "primitive", what-you-see-isn't-what-you-get interface: you're not distracted by the ephemera of making your work appear "just so", and can actually focus on the work of writing. And that, in our click-and-drool modern interfaces, is what we've lost -- and no amount of clever code wizardry on the part of the interface designers can bring us back to that. Why? Because of basic human nature - if we see a button, at some point we'll want to push that button - "just to make things look better." And, all of a sudden, we notice that the entire morning has flown past while we were focusing on the first three paragraphs of a major report that's due this afternoon. Oops.

There's a reason why almost every tool aimed at professional writers -- people who make their living at x cents per word -- have "stripped down", minimalist interfaces, at least as an option. It's the same reason that far too many truly "old-school" writers give for writing on paper and then typing (or having someone type) their words into a computer: the fewer distractions you have, while still being able to do what you're trying to do, the more productive you'll be at it.

That concept extends far, far beyond the writing of prose -- and has too often been lost or forgotten in those other areas as well. Pity.

When Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Don't Trip

I've been doing a lot of software installation lately, on Mac OS X and various BSDs and Linuxes. Doing so reminds me of one of the major banes of my life when developing for Windows. If you're a Windows usee, you're acutely familiar with the concept.

DLL Hell.

On Windows, as you install a dozen apps, each of them will try to install their own versions of many system-wide (or vendor-wide) libraries. The poster child for these is msvcrt.dll, the Microsoft C Runtime Library, upon which virtually everything in or running under Windows depends in some fashion. Many unhappy man-millenia have been spent by admins and PC owners the world over trying to resolve compatibility issues, usually introduced when a newly-installed app overwrites a more recent version with the earlier version that app shipped with. Other things — including other libraries the app may depend on or even Windows itself — may break since features and bug fixes they rely on (present in later versions of the library) are suddenly gone.

Why think about this, when I'm as likely to write (or even use) any Windows software in the next month as I am to win the local lottery without buying a ticket?

Because, one of the things I added to my new MacBook Pro was the MacPorts software, which is a Mac analogue to the BSD ports collection. The Linux equivalent to this is (more or less) your package manager, whether it be aptitude or yum or portage or whatever. Windows has no equivalent concept; every app you install is its own universe, or thinks it is (with the "benefits" noted earlier), and no central one-stop "update everything" capability.

Modern operating systems may not have DLL hell, but they do tend to have numerous different versions of different libraries and support frameworks installed. Since those can be accessed by apps as either "give me the most recent version" or "give me version x.y.z", no equivalent to DLL hell takes place. But it does tend to eat up disk space. And it makes it harder to mentally keep track of what's installed; installing the MacPorts edition of Bluefish, an HTML editor, installs some eighty other "ports" — direct or indirect dependencies of Bluefish (which itself is primarily a Linux app). Some of these dependencies are last-month recent updates; a few are several years old. But MacPorts determines which packages are needed by Bluefish (and its dependencies, and...) and installs the latest version (by default) of those dependencies, or the specific version asked for. Thus, several files with the same basic name, but different version numbers encoded into the filename, can coexist peacefully in virtually any modern OS.

Recent Microsoft system software, particularly the "managed" software using the .NET Framework, avoids most of the cavalier instances of DLL hell, but introduces other quirks and brittleness in compensation.

But I'm still a bit unnerved by a software package — any package mdash; that has 80+ designated dependencies. I'm certainly thankful that I don't have to manage that dependency matrix myself.

If modern software development is "standing on the shoulders of giants", to appropriate a Newton paraphrase, then careless dependency introduction would be the functional equivalent of drunken tap-dancing: almost impossible not to trip.