Re: two or more lines of icons

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 at 20:09:38 +0000, Uwe Brauer <oub(a)mat.ucm.es&gt; wrote: For some of us, it's too late. Seriously, though, I suspect that my experience as an educator is probably typical. I teach the intro to computer programming class about once every other year. We used to use Metrowerks CodeWarrior in that class. We found, though, that it induced the "click and drool" mentality among our students. All they knew was that this nice shiny IDE had neat looking buttons that, when pushed, caused Magic Stuff to happen. They had no clue what the thing was really doing. If they encountered an out of the ordinary situation, they couldn't cope. We switched to teaching the intro class with Linux and command line tools. Those students can be shown an IDE and be up and running on it very quickly, because they understand the underlying principles. The earlier students would be lost in a command line setting. Icons can be great shortcuts when you understand what they're doing. If they are magic buttons, though, the user has no hope of understanding what is going on when something goes wrong. This may induce a certain amount of anti-icon sentiment among some developers. -- Jerry James, who knows that there are 10 kinds of people in the world http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~james/