Description Mi Amidot 2006-08-09 10:46:43 EDT

After discourse of Bugzilla #153141, I am jumping into a conclusion that Eclipse UI menu structure needs "renormalisation" (a term physicists and their mathematics relatives use).

For the past twenty years, I see the need and desire for orthogonality in a menu structure. However, my persuasion is that the need for human ease of use and comprehensiveness over-rides any and all of the UI developers' desires for menu and product-layer orthogonality.

e.g., defining variables is bizarre. It is so VAX/VMS-esque (in their so called "layered products") - which I find outmoded. How would I know "declaring variables" had anything to do with attaching libraries. Just be straight forward and declare library elements and the jars constituting them. We should be able to have a menu item which say "Manage Libraries" - a straight forward terminology.

The use of an intermediate intervention called "variables" helps in objectivising and layering to allow a technology to be constructed orthogonally.

However, IBM (and its derivative organisations) repeatedly forget that there are more than one frames of orthogonality in any software products. There is a concept called "humans" (if IBM has yet to realise). And humans have their own frames of orthogonality. When the frames of human and machine orthogonality clash, as they often do, the human frames should always be allowed to triumph. 

Despite the staleness of stoking an ancient fire, I wish to remind the conflicts between O/S2 and MS Windows. Recall the time when IBM sales/marketing went around the world explaining that O/S2 had a real object oriented core while MS Win had only a pretentious one. I always chuckled behind the crowd because I realised that IBM had forgotten that real object orientation was of no significance to humans but a few. The frame of machine orthogonality IBM was promoting was not in harmony with the frames of orthogonality of various clans of humans.

Whilst MS Win allowed various UIs to see the file system, O/S2 allowed me only one. Increasingly third party MS Win desktops allowed us more choices.

On the other hand, Apple UI was successful because they found a niche clan of humans with widely similar set of orthogonality. Both MS and Apple successfully hid their machine orthogonality (or otherwise dis-orthogonality) from the user. On the contrary, IBM's products has frequently been to expose (or even boast about) the machine orthogonality.

Therefore, the trick is having a hidden machine orthogonality that would allow it to take on various guises - e.g. more than one navigator view - a highly configurable UI. Since there is not a common frame of human orthogonality, a few (about three would suffice) UI schemes should be preconfigured to satisfy the most common set of human frames.

I am realising that my post here is itself not too comprehensive while the term "orthogonality" may not be familiar with too many people and my stoking an ancient fire not too helpful. However, I hope there are enough people who understand the intention of my post and give us a nice and comfortable IDE to use.