Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!hsdndev!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Computers for users not programmers
Message-ID: <13099@lanl.gov>
Date: 30 Jan 91 20:53:27 GMT
References: <1991Jan30.100611.6787@lth.se>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 29

From article <1991Jan30.100611.6787@lth.se>, by magnus%thep.lu.se@Urd.lth.se (Magnus Olsson):

I agree with everything else you said - except the following.

> [...]
>b)The users with som knowledge of programming (let's not be picky about whether
>  these are programmers or users - they act as users, anyway), who use one
>  terminal window on their workstation and the simplest possible editor (like
>  dxnotepad under DECwindows) to write, compile and link small Fortran
>  programs, and learn to do this and to send and receive mail, but never much
>  more.

That's about the way I use UNIX.  I've had a UNIX workstation for several
years.  I don't use just one window (I usually have about 7).  I _do_ use
the simplest adequate editor I could find (the Rand editor: e).  I write
Fortran (and other language) programs - but "small" is a relative term -
I regard anything less than 10000 lines as small.  However, I don't
compile and link any of these on UNIX - frankly, UNIX could never hope to
run any of them (UNICOS on the Cray, perhaps - but not the UNIX on the
workstation).  I don't learn UNIX tools (more than a taste here and
there), because it's obvious than none of them do anything helpful: no
asynchronous I/O support, no tools to aid vectorizing code, no tools to
analyze stability of numerical algorithms, etc..  Even the debuggers are
crummy compared to what I have available elsewhere.  Except for the big
screen (that lets me see lots of context of my current problems all
at once), UNIX just plain doesn't do anything that's useful to me.  And,
for a mainframe (like a Cray), UNIX is a vast step backward.

J. Giles