Surely he can fill us in on how, in a past life, he had to make the difficult transition from hieroglyphics to a phonetic alphabet.

There is a bitter kernel of truth in that comedy skit, though. I can remember the difficulty I had as a graduate assistant teaching the older students how to program, how they managed to find every single possibility to screw up and how even the simplest concepts (like the difference between a thing and it's name: a variable) seemed so difficult for them to grasp.

Now that the era of programming languages, command line interfaces, and control card input is long gone, I'm the one having problems absorbing some of the simple computer skills even kids today have no trouble picking up on their own. Is it a question of age, or is there some kind of generational component at work here? How can it be difficult for someone who used to write scientific software for a living to learn how to use GUIs? No, they are not intuitive to me. I can write object oriented code in Reverse Polish Lisp, but I have trouble learning how to use word processors and spreadsheets. Especially since they seem to be springing a new one on me every six months. People who can't read a hex dump or write assembler are amazed I have trouble downloading and installing software. So am I.

I suspect the next big thing in man-machine communications will be voice processing command interfaces, perhaps augmented by virtual reality avatars and virtual controls and displays. We will talk and gesture with our computers, sort of like they did with HAL in "2001". But it will be a long time before a true plain-English artificial intelligence is perfected, for a long time we will have to learn a dialect of English designed to be understandable by both software and people. I wonder if people who today have developed such a wonderful intuition at working with icons and Windows-type interfaces will have the same trouble adapting as I'm experiencing.