An article called Version Fatigue, on how difficult it is to keep up with changes in technology, caused Eric Raymond to gloat that because he's been using Un*x based tools he hasn't had to, to which Arnold Kling replied:
I wish that Raymond or Doc Searls or any of their command-line bigot friends could spend just one day as an attorney, a secretary, or any other office worker whose job is something other than composing rants or editing computer code.
Mr. Kling apparently has a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, so we'll excuse him for being clue-deficient[*], but I'd like to know if he was in an attorney's office in the late 80s or early 90s? Not your basic strip-mall lawyer with the store-front next to the accountant, but a big office, with lots of partners, and a whole bunch of really smart secretaries running the place?
The secretaries I saw in those offices did things with Word Perfect 5.1 that makes many Emacs hackers look like total duffers. You want contract "X" for client "Y"? Less keystrokes than I thought were possible. And in talking with a few in the post Microsoft environment, they would kill for a good scripting environment like they had, or like Emacs and troff or TEX provides. Unfortunately, people who don't have those visualization and abstraction skills, the partners, decided that the glitz and ease of first use of Word trumped the raw long-term power of Word Perfect. Legal offices are less productive for it.
There are plenty of people out there capable of basic abstract thought, Mr. Kling , don't go imposing the limitations of the cognitive processes of attorneys on their secretaries. Secretaries are quite often completely competent people with good visualization skills and logical thought systems.
You can comment on this rant .
[*] "You couldn't get a clue during the height of the clue mating season on the clue mating grounds if you smeared your body with clue musk (or pheromones, or cluejuice), wore clue bondage gear and did the clue mating dance, surrounded on all sides by thousands of raging, horny clues."
--- Bill Carton riffing on R. Scott
Friday, June 21st, 2002 danlyke@flutterby.com