Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!o.gp.cs.cmu.edu!spot From: spot@CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Draves) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: How wrong is MS-DOS? (or: Tools Tools Tools) Message-ID: Date: 13 Jan 91 05:24:34 GMT References: <11255@lanl.gov> Sender: netnews@cs.cmu.edu (USENET News Group Software) Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Lines: 36 In-Reply-To: jlg@lanl.gov's message of 13 Jan 91 04:16:35 GMT In article <11255@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: 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 so you could play around with the functionality before building a production quality version as a single utility. ... The appropriate level of interaction between the components of a software environment is very rarely a pipe. The appropriate level of interaction is _much_ more often a procedure call. Your use of UNIX must be very different from mine (and others'), or you are talking about programming and not interactive use. I do *not* want to write a program every time I want to search a file for a word. The stuff I write with shell (pipes and all those funny utilities) are mostly one-shot hacks. Something I need done now and probably not ever again in the future. So "rapid prototyping" is *exactly* what I want. If you are saying you would never write production code in csh using all those utilities, then I agree. And so will (nearly?) everyone else. That would be slow and gross. But my day to day use of the computer demands a flexible set of tools which I can combine in useful ways to accomplish all sorts of crazy things. csh + unix utilities + elisp works quite well. -- IBM Scott Draves Intel spot@cs.cmu.edu Microsoft