[PLUG] The wrong app

[gepr at tempusdictum.com]

Paul Heinlein writes:
 > On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Ed Sawicki wrote:
 > 
 > > I'm teaching a college course and I'd like to give my students some
 > > rough stats on how often people use the wrong program for given
 > > tasks. I see it frequently but I wonder if my experiences are
 > > typical. For example, I see many people use spreadsheet programs
 > > when a database is the clearly better way. I think that all but one
 > > of my consulting customers is using at least one wrong app. What's
 > > your experience?
 > 
 > The biggest example of this that I see is using smtp to push large
 > attachments to others. Many headaches are saved when people learn how
 > to use http and/or ftp instead.

This is a bad one.  However, I regularly see a worse one, that of
using Excel (or other spreadsheets) to process (reduce), analyze, and
visualize scientific data.

I admit to having written entire missile simulations in spreadsheets
before; so, I can't cast the first stone.  But nothing is more
frustrating than trying to teach a grad student to use SAS, R, or any
of the other serious tools... don't even consider trying to get them
to understand when to use things like CVS or or a numerics library
like LAPACK.  It seems like there's a gene for using judgement in
picking the right tool for a job... either you're born with it or
you're not.

Of course, this is all very subjective.  Artifacts are, in some ways,
autotelic.  They may have been created teleologically; but, as soon 
as an ignorant user can pick it up and start farting around with it
(like a 5 year old with a playstation), the final cause becomes an 
emergent property of the usage patterns.

Anyway, good luck getting actual stats.  The only thing I've seen
in this regard are the IDS and forensic tools that track "abnormal"
behavior.  There were also projects at IBM and UNM to dynamically
learn typical usage patterns for tools like lpr.  But, I doubt one
could ever quantify how often, say, Acrobat is used wrongly.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
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