Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!linac!att!rutgers!ub!canisius!pavlov From: pavlov@canisius.UUCP (Greg Pavlov) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: How wrong is MS-DOS? (or: Tools Tools Tools) Message-ID: <3132@canisius.UUCP> Date: 14 Jan 91 02:32:23 GMT References: <11255@lanl.gov> Organization: Canisius College, Buffalo N.Y. 14208 Lines: 28 In article <11255@lanl.gov>, jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: > > No. Piping things together is about the _least_ efficient way of > incorporating a functionality into a tool. Almost _anything_ is > an improvement. The additional muscle required to support UNIX > is due in large part to preferential use of this least efficient > technique. > The reality that we see at DOS-based sites (and we work with a lot of them) are the ubiquitous "bat files", which are built to perform almost any possible computer-based function one could possibly dream of. Misuse of tools and resources ? Yes. But people will tend to do things the easiest way that they can find. I find the "_least_efficient" piping much more efficient - people and resource-wise. > > The paradigm you are describing was recommended to as a way of perfomrming > what we would today call "rapid prototyping". It was a way of getting > a quick-and-dirty version of a new tool ..... ... and as a quick-and-dirty way of getting one-time jobs done. 5-15 minutes of people time to put together a shell script plus 1-10 minutes to execute it is a heck of a lot more cost-efficient from my budgeting point of view than 15 minutes to 1 day of programmer time plus 10 seconds to 2 minutes' computer execution time. And in the former case, the programming staff often isn't involved. pavlov@stewart.fstrf.org