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From: info-mac@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re: Thoughts on what a new Finder should look like
Message-ID: <374@uw-beaver>
Date: Fri, 11-Jan-85 01:56:37 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.374
Posted: Fri Jan 11 01:56:37 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Jan-85 02:59:59 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Piersol.pasa@XEROX.ARPA

I disagree with your desire to push the Finder closer to UNIX.  I would
like to see some UNIX-like features incorporated, certainly, but I see
no reason to add features like grep, etc.  Remember that Mac is intended
as an 'appliance' computer, not a programmer's machine.  Many of the
functions you reference are rather esoteric for a non-programmer, and I
have doubts whether they have great utility to 'the rest of us'.  The
point is that they would increase still further the size of the finder,
which is already rather large.  It is my feeling that they belong in a
programmer environment separate from the Finder.  Something like a
visual UNIX (visible pipes, filters by example, etc) would be fantastic,
or, ideally, Smalltalk would be most enjoyable.

I am a Smalltalk applications programmer, and so I tend to find
UNIX-like environments unnecessarily cryptic.  Thus I object to names
like grep, cat, sed, etc.  I would like to see Apple add similar
function in a more natural interface.  I feel they did an excellent job
of handling the most basic file manipulations in Finder, and would love
to see a similarly good job done on the higher-level functions that have
been developed over the years.

Kurt