Date: 06 Oct 1998 11:25:30 -0700 From: Tony Li <tli@juniper.net> To: asmodai@wxs.nl (Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai) Cc: freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: WWW i/f Message-ID: <82hfxhzgx1.fsf@chimp.juniper.net> In-Reply-To: asmodai@wxs.nl's message of 5 Oct 98 22:31:03 GMT References: <000501bdf069$12346d60$0104010a@andrewh.famzon.com.au> <Version.32.19981006002405.00e4f7c0@pop.wxs.nl>
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asmodai@wxs.nl (Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai) writes: > >The same applies to command lines. If you design badly you get a bad result > >(hence the comments earlier in this group about how bad Cisco IOS is. > >Command line completion does a lot to "rescue" the useability of Cisco IOS). > > What's so wrong about IOS? I still don't see it. The problem with IOS is that the command structure and interaction is completely inconsistent from command to command. This came about because the command parsing and consistency was originally done by one engineer, but as Cisco scaled up, it got distributed and there was no centralized design to provide for consistency across the command line. Some processes were put in place to try to control this, but it was not a clear focus of the company and by then the basic damage was done. To be fair, the other problem was that there was incremental development of many features and it was never possible to grapple with the entire human interface until after it had already shipped. We should separate the results of the above problem with the good aspects of IOS: the command completion (blatantly stolen from Tops-20) and help strings made the command line tolerable. Bottom line: if you can map out the command hierarchy today for everything that you want to do for the next 3 years, you're probably ok with a command line interface. Tony [cisco employee '91-'96] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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