Re: Middle click, "dumbing down" Slashdotted

[Ray Morris <webmastersguide2000 yahoo com>]

Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> said:

> You're making a lot of assumptions here. When this story broke it was
> on the basis of two commits, and had no other background information.


I've read some of the discussion. The news stories did pick up on context menu, making it a non-default 
setting, etc.
It does appear that there is additional background I haven't located any record of.  I'm not making any 
assumptions 
about what that may be.  I have read discussion of making things easier for new users, the key word 
"discoverable" 
is used more than once on the page about the proposal, etc.  Based on the available background, I'm pointing 
out a 
principle that is true globally.  For any system that will be used many times, over a period of time, it is 
false economy |
to make it simpler in the beginning by making it harder in the long run. 

The interface we're using right now, English, is a great example. Suppose someone proposed simplifying 
English so 
that it could be learned completely in six months, that we remove any words or language constructs not used 
by 
six-month-olds babies? That would of course be ridiculous.  We want the interface we're using to be deep, to 
have more and 
more power we can discover over time.  Just as young children learn "mama", then later learn "maternal", new 
users can 
use ctrl-c/ ctrl-v, until they learn more.  (Though ctrl-c is of course a _terrible_ habit on Linux.  The 
same keystroke is used both
for copying data and for immediately killing the program with extreme prejudice, losing all data.)