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These "wet" labs usually do not have many people who are enthusiastic about computers in the programming, text-only sense. Usually there is one or two people t

These "wet" labs usually do not have many people who are enthusiastic about computers in the programming, text-only sense. Usually there is one or two people that know some stuff and they do all the technical stuff for everyone else. It's not uncommon to find people who are actually quite computer phobic in these labs. The general interest in computers is prefering Mac's to PC's and that's about as far as it goes. If you start talking up some programming solution to the wrong person you may actually alienate them. The problem extends to much of the software that is written too. There are some command line suites that do batch processing, e.g. for sequences, but much of the software is point and click. And that's the problem. No one expects the typical lab user of these programs to be versed in using the command line and doing batch jobs. Everything is mouse-driven. Even if the back end is powerful, the front end is always a slow GUI. This just slows everything down. Another shining example of this sort of thing is audio engineering. You have programs that are designed as GUI's that look like physical pieces of gear. You move the mouse around to adjust turn knobs, switches and sliders and adjust settings. Extremely cumbersome. But this is how they expect users to be comfortable. Then companies started selling physical consoles with real knobs, switches and sliders to control the software. It's comical. The touch screen trend is not going to help people get comfortable with the command line. And the key to realy fast computing is using a command line and batch processing. There is no way around it. When you are pointing and clicking, you are just sending a signal that began as a text instruction in the code anyway. Why not just start with the text command and skip the point and click?

blt 14y ago
You can't turn two knobs at once in a live performance with a mouse.
bitwize 14y ago
It's comical. Only to someone who's never mixed a song. Professional audio engineers do their work by FEELING the position of the equipment, making adjustments, and LISTENING to the results. And they expect the feedback to be instant -- just like playing a musical instrument. Now put them in front of a command line and imagine if they had to type out their intents, listen to the results, and then make tweaks to their typed-in textual program to effect some change in the audio output. You'd end up with a bored, pissed, unproductive audio engineer. The sliders and switches made digital audio professionals MORE productive, not less -- even more so when they became controls on a physical console with digital outputs, as it put controlling the digital gear back in the analog realm a musician is already familiar with. I find it also interesting that lab environments and music are where plenty of programming takes place by people who are not occupational programmers -- and much of it is visual, in environments like LabVIEW and Max/MSP. This is the future of programming. It is why we should listen to those who say we are too bound to a textual representation for our programs and that in order for the craft to evolve, a richer representation must be embraced.

blt 14y ago

You can't turn two knobs at once in a live performance with a mouse.

bitwize 14y ago

It's comical. Only to someone who's never mixed a song. Professional audio engineers do their work by FEELING the position of the equipment, making adjustments, and LISTENING to the results. And they expect the feedback to be instant -- just like playing a musical instrument. Now put them in front of a command line and imagine if they had to type out their intents, listen to the results, and then make tweaks to their typed-in textual program to effect some change in the audio output. You'd end up with a bored, pissed, unproductive audio engineer. The sliders and switches made digital audio professionals MORE productive, not less -- even more so when they became controls on a physical console with digital outputs, as it put controlling the digital gear back in the analog realm a musician is already familiar with. I find it also interesting that lab environments and music are where plenty of programming takes place by people who are not occupational programmers -- and much of it is visual, in environments like LabVIEW and Max/MSP. This is the future of programming. It is why we should listen to those who say we are too bound to a textual representation for our programs and that in order for the craft to evolve, a richer representation must be embraced.