I have followed the correspondence between Russ Nelson and the developers with
quite some interest. I am also trying to get "into" GRASS, and am an
experienced, even intensive, user of ILWIS, IDRISI, ArcInfo, Un*x, PERL etc. I
also was tremendously confused, not the least by the region concept, but I stuck
with it mainly because I wanted to use Helena's excellent r.surf stuff. What I
suggest you do, Russ, is write a GRASS5-BEGINNER-HowTo, addressed to someone
like yourself. I found the available tutorial material either quite outdated,
not to the point (rambling), specific to a project, or in German (kein Problem
für mich, aber es gibt viele Menschen die Deutsch nicht koennen lesen...).
A good example is emacs. Talk about a strange interface and strange concepts
(what is a kill ring??)! But, have you ever seen a newbie try it? Yes, because
you are told "just type emacs -t and follow the tutorial, then you will never be
lost". We can't have that in GRASS but there could be a simple tutorial which
covers the newbie case. It's best that you write it while the frustrations are
fresh in your mind.
Also, in R, you can type demo() to be walked through typical simple situations.
As for the positional defaults, I greatly prefer the keyword approach, as it
avoids inadvertant confusions of input and output (how many times have I
switched the order in ln -s ?). But having said that, R uses the first few
positions for the really obvious things (like a formula in lm) and then keywords
for the options.
D G Rossiter