Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!rbj
From: rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Ware Ware Wizardjin
Message-ID: <128236@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: 10 Apr 91 02:08:37 GMT
References: <9104072151.AA28702@gaia>
Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA
Lines: 39

<9104072151.AA28702@gaia> kemnitz@POSTGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Greg Kemnitz) writes:
>Somebody wrote:
>>>Gee, listening to some wizards, you'd think the bad old days had
>>>come back when computer time was more important than human time,
>>>and Herculian feats of engineering were required to make the computer
>>>do much of anything.
>>
>>That's not the point at all. 

Actually, that is the point.

>When I first encountered X, I thought that it was truly horrible

You are correct.

>- it was
>painfully slow, quite a pain to program, and binaries linked to it tended
>to fill up the disk rather quickly, especially as toolkit upon toolkit was 
>layered on top of it.

That's part of it. But the real problem is that it's too difficult to
program. You can't possibly remember all those include files, arguments,
and function calls. You'll need a whole shelf of manuals to write
the simplest code.

Another thing I hate about X is the protocol. There are missing
fields (requests are implicitly numbered; replies include this
number but not the function code), yet large blocks of space are
wasted in many requests. Some packets are timestamped, others aren't.
The protocol was designed to do only what it does; it is very difficult
to capture and replay an X session with any reliability (I know,
I've done it). Device independence? Hogwash! Unlike NeWS, the
interpreter is in the wrong place. Yeah the server swaps bytes,
but the client must use the server's pixel sizes, colormaps, etc.
Once a given conversation has been recorded, it is not portable
to a different server, and there is no obvious translation.
-- 
		[rbj@uunet 1] stty sane
		unknown mode: sane