Re: Useful Dumb User Questions
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg9020] Re: [mg8988] Useful Dumb User Questions
- From: Mark Evans <evans at gte.net>
- Date: Wed, 8 Oct 1997 00:05:18 -0400
- Organization: None
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
In one day I have received several answers to my post. Three out of four are in agreement, while Jens-Peer Kuska's reply is a shining example of exactly the condescension I am talking about. The comparison of Mathematica with Microsoft Windows is nearly exact. Both products have a commanding lead in their field, both are hard to use in many ways, and both have a lot of hidden behaviors that only the home company knows about. Both also claim to make your life easier! The caricature of my comments by Kuska is out of place. I am not talking about school girls and factory workers. Since he asks, let me say that the people I have in mind are typically Ph.D.'s in technical fields who are simply not expert programmers. I have tried to teach Mathematica to many of them. The fact that they read the manual and still don't "get it" tells me that the program is hard to use. I have been evangelizing Mathematica for years, but find that these people typically tinker with it and then fall back to their old tools because they encounter so many error messages. Version 3 is an amazing product, but keep in mind that other programs have allowed typset input for a long time, although I won't name names because of the way in which this newsgroup is moderated. I watch other dumb users sit down at some of these programs and "get it" almost immediately. So therefore I conclude that MMA is hard to use, even though it is not hard for me personally, and in fact I find it very productive. Mark