I continue to be frustrated by computers’ failure to do what I mean. This oft-discussed and seldom-implemented feature takes a lot of programmer skill and time to get right, but the better we do at it the more productive people will be when using machines.
One example of proper DWIM, is the command line tab-ahead in Unix (including OSX, of course!) If I type cd /Vol then hit the tab key, it tries to complete my instruction by finishing cd /Volumes (since that’s the only directory that matches).
Of course the end goal of this sort of technology would be to parse complex English commands into complex sequences of instructions; for example, if I could tell my computer (either by voice or from the command line) to “reinstall the web statistics package” and it would determine what I meant and try to do it, prompting me for assistance if necessary (“Do you want it installed for all websites, or only a specific one?” or better “I assume you meant for all websites; if you meant only a specific one say it now.”). I could also ask “What’s wrong with mysql?” and be told “It’s failing because the password was changed; please tell me the new password.”)
Instead what we get is the opposite. The other day I was trying to create a new user in Windows. I entered the new user name, and hit continue, and was told “The new user fred could not be created because the user fred does not exist.” Well, duh – I’m trying to create it. I still don’t know what was going wrong there. I guess this is one of the things that annoys me most about computers, when you get problems that are not covered in the manuals, and when the computers do things they’re not supposed to. Blind crashes (Blue Screen of Death) is the worst example, but every few days while checking my email I get failures for no apparent reason. Sometimes the reason is obvious but still frustrating – I was using webmail to compose a long letter to my dad, and when I got done and clicked save (briefly thinking after I’d clicked, I probably should have done a select all/copy first) it told me that I had waited too long and my session had timed out – and lost the letter I’d written, irretrivably. (It’s easy to imagine how to fix problems like that, but often more difficult to implement; what if I had walked away and someone else had finished the letter maliciously? I’d think the best solution would be to save it in drafts so I could review it when I returned)
By the way, one of the reasons I haven’t written lately is that this blog hasn’t been working properly since I upgraded my system – for some reason sort by date isn’t working properly. Which makes me too frustrated to write. Pfeh.