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Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2015 20:33:13 -0400
Message-Id: <201508250033.t7P0XDMA022123@envy.delorie.com>
From: DJ Delorie <dj AT delorie DOT com>
To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
In-reply-to: <176EF6F6-264E-4F66-A52E-D9A3C3442B91@noqsi.com> (message from
	John Doty on Mon, 24 Aug 2015 18:27:52 -0400)
Subject: Re: [geda-user] Buttons for automation (obligatory grab at our shared 3rd rail) Re: [geda-user] Antifork
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> Adding features to a simple tool does not make it easier to use.

Except we don't have a simple tool, we have *many* simple tools.  The
large number of tools causes its own complexity.  And we've seen that
new users find "the toolkit way" to be difficult to learn because it's
not obvious how all the parts work together - There's too much
complexity to absorb.

Managing the relationships between tools, and encapsulating the
overall tasks we want to accomplish, is a neccessary part of using a
toolkit - it's no different than writing a shell script or makefile to
coordinate all the unixy tools.  If the nature of this encapsulation
and scripting is a button in a gui, that's only natural for a
gui-centric tool, just like a shell script is natural for a
command-line tool.

If we look at the extreme of simplicity - that adding features is
never good - we wouldn't have emacs or vi, we'd only have cat (or
maybe toggle switches, if you didn't like manually moving wires
around).  We wouldn't have email clients, we'd only have telnet (I
hope you memorized the SMTP protocol).  The tools that make up the
gEDA suite are, in essence, no more than text editors with lots of
features added - there's nothing you can do in gEDA that you can't do
with a good text editor and a lot of thinking, but using gEDA makes it
easier.