Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!ATHENA.MIT.EDU!swick
From: swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: translations vs. hard-coding
Message-ID: <8906161233.AA20184@LYRE.MIT.EDU>
Date: 16 Jun 89 12:33:05 GMT
References: <8906152153.AA11670@promethium.bsw.com>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: DEC/MIT Project Athena
Lines: 15

Your observations and plea are certainly welcomed here.
We couldn't agree more!

My only real comment is in defense of at least one of the two
applications you cite, and others of their generation; it's only
a (mere :-) matter of time.  Chris had the less than pleasant
experience of developing xman concurrently with the development
of Xt and Xaw (pre R1 days, folks).  For some odd reason, getting
it to work and keeping it working under each baselevel of the
tools got more attention than did making its implementation
a perfect coding example.  You'll be thrilled with the cleanup
Chris has done in xman for the next release, I promise :-)

We're slowly headed towards the nirvana of having the core
clients be useful programming examples as well as useful tools...