Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 01:48:12 -0500 From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de Cc: rob@arpa.COM, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: benchmark Message-ID: <199611210648.BAA26001@hill.gnu.ai.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <9611200926.AA03350@wavehh.hanse.de> (cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de)
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1) All the people you can hire to do work on NT I know (no matter
whether free, working for a consultant or being employees) are
ignorant in a way you can't do any serious project with
them.
The real reason here: think to yourself, do I want to hire somebody who
has chosen NT as their computer path, or somebody who has chosen Unix?
Remember: NT is designed as an easy-to-use networking base. Unix is
designed as a powerful networking base. (I'm just talking about where
the effort is going now, not about history or the way things actually
are.)
This way of thinking helps deter a lot of problems.
2) It's not only NT itself that offers non-optimal solutions to a
large number of problems. Using NT means you use all those junk
applications that are worse by a large factor. If you are working on
NT, you will be surprised how fast you'll get forced to use Visual
Basic, Borland development tools and some braindead, simple-minded,
closed database "toolkit".
If you're speaking of what's availible, I disagree. There are
flexible, powerful compilers around for Win32.
If you're speaking of what's normally used, I agree. In the Windows
world, easy-to-use is the rule. For end users, that's wonderful, but
for programmers (and those who consider themselves programmers because
they can use Paradox), it's a trap.
Even so, consider: when I first started working for my present
employer this year, I was assigned to write a hardware fault tracking
system, and given a database and screen library. The library was
written for DOS and ported to Unix. I don't know when it was written,
but it was in K&R C. You remember; no prototypes, no type-checking,
etc. Mind you, like most of us, I cut my teeth on K&R C, and don't
mind it at all; I'm just giving you an idea of age. Most of the windowing
routines had been mauled to pieces by our locals, who didn't understand
curses, nor the original software, nor Unix programming concepts.
(Said locals have since left.) Half of the routines didn't work, and
those that didn't were misdocumented. I was given a menuing system
written as subroutines in a .h file ("ld? make? Object files? What
the **** is all that?") to replace the one that came with the library.
After I had written my first version and was told our policy on
hardware repairs (which I had not been able to extract from my
coworkers when I started the project), and seen (and somewhat
debugged) the terrible horror that I was having to work with, I
recompiled it without windowing routines, wrote my own library on a
modern ncurses, and started working a new version of the tracking
system. My boss told me that I was to use the library I had
previously eschewed, because "it's the way we do it here," and if we
needed to do it any other way "David would have told us" (David is our
resident star programmer).
David was using a version of the library that was two major revisions
later, on Windows, and spoke of the Unix version I was using with the
same disdain as I had. However, he had never seen it fit to complain,
since he wasn't developing for Unix, so the library, buggy as it was,
became law.
The moral: sometimes, even in the land of milk and honey, Management
still will give you vinegar for wine.
3) In the windows world, you are usually not longer in a position to
change the implementation of a tool you use for a project.
[insert Stallmanesque sermon here]
On Unix, I have a nightly script running that adds the
subjects of all threads spread over more than N newsgroups to my
killfile (most useful program I've ever written). How the heck can I
do so on NT?
This is really again the design philosophy. Unix is written around
easy and powerful programming. NT is written around market shares.
That's life.
Cheers,
Joel
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