Describes a user interface
under which "What You See Is All You Get"; an unhappy
variant of WYSIWYG. Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style
interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to
lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be better
served by a command-style interface. When this happens, the
frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most often
used of editors, word processors, and document formatting programs.
WYSIWYG `desktop publishing' programs, for example, are a clear
win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and graphics in
them, especially things like newsletters and presentation slides.
When typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale
changes the nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG
limitations, and the increased power and flexibility of a
command-driven formatter like TeX or Unix's troff
becomes not just desirable but a necessity. Compare YAFIYGI.
brute force adj.
Describes a primitive programming style
one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing
power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the
problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive
methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....
