Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!rpi!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen
From: davidsen@sixhub.UUCP (Wm E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: Why use U* over VMS
Message-ID: <2116@sixhub.UUCP>
Date: 22 Oct 90 01:00:09 GMT
References: <16438@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Reply-To: davidsen@sixhub.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: *IX Public Access UNIX, Schenectady NY
Lines: 55


  Well, there are a lot of tools using the same conventions, so you can
learn something and use the info in many places. Regular expressions
come to mind.

  There are a number of user interfaces, allowing the developer to use
the one most suited to his (her) needs or preferences. In the same vein
there are more editors than you can count, and many are customizable.

  UNIX has a large number of tools which manipulate data and pass it on,
giving the ability to do many ad hoc text enquiries and manipulations
using pipes, without intermediate files. This is simply not practical in
VMS, due to the high overhead required for process creation. No matter
what the horsepower of the CPU, a pipe with more than a few processes is
slow. I have run DECshell on an unloaded large VAX (sorry, number
escapes me), and it is a pig.

  The filenames are more consistant in UNIX, and you can have links when
needed to make directory structures intuitive. That doesn't mean simple,
just that you can find the same data file in /techrept/mit and
mit/techrept, without having multiple copies. You don't need to know
where a file is physically to get to it, that's the diference of
"~joe_s/doc/scan" as opposed to "BIGVAX::USR$DISK3:[JOES.DOCS]SCAN."

  VMS assumes that it knows what you're doing, and UNIX assumes that
*you* know what you're doing. If a filename doesn't have a dot in it VMS
usually wants to add one, and a filetype. Often it guesses right, but it
still guesses.

  UNIX has what appear to be better tools standard to allow multiple
users to develop on the same project, Notable SCCS and make. And there
are versions of these themes if you don't find vanilla fits your
situation.

  Portability is important. You can do development on a number of
platforms, and if you follow some rules the result can be run on any and
all of them. You really can do development on mixes like Ultrix, SunOS,
and V.3.2, with all developers compiling the successive production parts
on their machine, but doing the editing and testing of modules against
the current base locally. NFS makes this possible.

  Access control in VMS can be by access control list, that's not in
most versions of UNIX. UNIX uses groups to get the same functionality,
but it works poorly if you have a large number of files and need to
control access to each one individually. That is not usually needed or
even remotely useful in most software development environments.

  That's about it for head to head in my mind, I find the UNIX
environment easy to tailor to the way I want a computer to work, and
that usually improves productivity.
-- 
bill davidsen - davidsen@sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
    sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
    moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me