When you're doing something and want to do it well, how you approach is essential. I think for a lot of us, the GUI is really easy. Everything is just there in front of you, or hidden under a menu, and things are usually easy to figure out. I think the trickiest program I've used in the GUI is Ardour: that does take a bit of brain work. And maybe GIMP, too. But the GUI has an element, and that is visual. Everything you need is right in front of you.
When you hit the command line, things are not visual anymore. You type a command, and there are options you have to remember, and arguments, and syntax (which hopefully is intuitive, but can be arbitrary). I'm going to the man pages all the time because I can't remember things. I need a different approach, the same approach (I think) that programmers have been using for a long time. I need to see the process of what I'm doing in my mind's eye. I need to imagine it happening before I look at what's on the screen. I've gotten lazy over time and expect the machine to do the thinking for me, but it really works the other way around.
I suspect that it's the same for other disciplines. Glenn Gould talks about imagining the music of J. S. Bach for the first time when he was thirteen, and that was a turning point for him. C. S. Lewis began writing Narnia from images and dreams that he was having. Let us be pioneers of a new reality, one that comes to us in dreams and the things we see that are hidden from others. Let us change the world.
Those are my thoughts, and welcome to my new blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment