Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 23:55:25 +0200 From: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ATT Unix for Windows ! Message-ID: <19970826235525.22143@grendel.IAEhv.nl> In-Reply-To: <19970826083051.FR52594@uriah.heep.sax.de>; from J Wunsch on Tue, Aug 26, 1997 at 08:30:51AM %2B0200 References: <199708251245.WAA23142@oznet11.ozemail.com.au> <19970825204932.12036@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <34020362.7DB1@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co> <19970825224258.55928@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970826083051.FR52594@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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J Wunsch shared with us: > As Peter Korsten wrote: > > [Visual C++, Makefiles, etc.] > > Of course, this is all my very personal opinion, but i'm sure quite a > number of people feel the same. This might explain to the VC++ etc. > users why there is so little `resonance' to IDE projects in a Unix > world. Once you got used to the Unix way, you don't miss the Visual > stuff. (Once you would be forced to return to that Visual stuff, > after you've been used to the Unix way, i'm sure i would *hate* it.) There are some pro's and con's to the Visual approach. One appearant disadvantage is the price (well, try to beat "no cost") and the fact that it consumes vast resources (250 Mb NT 4.0 server, 250 Mb VC++ and with 250 Mb Office 97 and 250 Mb SQL Server that's one disk down). The fact that I like windows, mice, pop-ups, buttons and the like perhaps lies in my Amiga background. (That's the only machine I know that had a perfect sybiosis between GUI, Shell and AREXX, BTW) All programs look the same; the learning curve is steeper than with a text-oriented environment. I've never read a manual for NT, Word or VC++. Just the incidental help file. Of course I can use a Makefile for anything. With proper configu- ration, you might even get sendmail to do the job. I find the flexibility that Unix offers with it's pretty free-format confi- guration files rather a disadvantage. You have to look up what all the options are in a different location (a man page or an info file) and then add the lot in your Makefile, /etc/inetd.conf or .blahrc. For the project I was talking about, I've made a clever (though rather simple) Makefile, that takes the input files (I saw no way to take all .c files with the standard - not Gnu - make) and creates the names of the .o files out of it. It also does something with Yacc. In VC++, I just add all the .c files into my project. I can create a browser info file and jump to the point in any source file where an identifier is declared or used. Without having read a manual. The real mess begins, when you want to program a Windows application or use the Microsoft Foundation Classes. But I doubt that programming an X-application is much simpler. If I forget the various disadvantages of Windows (NT) (try to protect a single directory in IIS with a password, hah), the most appealing aspect I find the uniformity and the integration. This is something I miss in Unix. X is an improvement over the text interface that preceded it, but it misses the integration, like a uniform interface and drag-and-drop. At the moment, Unix is more suited for large networks than NT is (which among other things has got to do with those stupid licenses). But I think a lot of potential customers like the same things as I do in a system. So the developers may like a text interface, many people don't. And apart from all the marketing hype MS is creating, that's something to be considered - though very hard to solve. - Peter
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