Re: WDSC vs SEU

albartell skrev den 16-10-2007 19:26:

While we are talking about the benefit of WDSC, and interesting point was
made at SystemiDeveloper conf at one of the sessions. A gentleman by the
name of Peter Johnson (at least I think it was him who said it) mentioned
that a good reason for adopting WDSC would be to attract younger talent.
Put a 5250 session and Visual Studio beside each other and I can tell you
what an 18 to 25yr old is going to pick - they don't care about
quality/performance/stability/ect at that age (or most don't).

So what you are basically saying is that developers have the same issues as users, namely that you expect more from the system than what a green screen is capable of providing?

Developers are the ultimate power users, and all the things that go in designing good web sites are true too for IDE's:

* Provide as much information on-screen as you can, and put even more in easily accessible locations (e.g. mouse hovering over a variable shows the content of that variable)

* Provide as much context on the bits you see on-screen, i.e. right-clicking any ítem gives you all the valid options on that item

* etc.

Coming from a Unix world where much effort has gone into providing character based interfaces, I believe that the single thing that IBM _could_ have done (and possibly still can) to benefit the green screens is to allow more information on-screen by lifting the hard limits on the screen sizes. A screen should be able to be 300x50 or more if that is what the users display can handle.

I frequently use the WordPerfect 5.1 program as an analogy for what the iSeries is, namely character based work and lots of function keys. This analogy is getting more true every day. WP51 is a great and robust piece of software, but the only ones who are using it today is the ones who NEED to. Why say that the young ones are not caring about quality/performance/stability/etc when that is not the real problem?