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From: jerry@TALOS.UUCP (Jerry Gitomer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Ware Ware Wizardjin
Message-ID: <1795@TALOS.UUCP>
Date: 10 Apr 91 14:20:12 GMT
References: <9104072151.AA28702@gaia>
Organization: NPRI, Alexandria VA
Lines: 34

kemnitz@POSTGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Greg Kemnitz) writes:

|When I first encountered X, I thought that it was truely horrible - 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.  But it appears that it is easier to wait for fast
|machines rather than to design standard graphics protocols that aren't bloated,
|politically acceptable masses.  Also, it appears that the de facto trend in
|industry is to hope hardware improves fast enough to let poorly written
|software run well rather than writing software properly, and it is hard to
|argue that this strategy has been a complete failure, even if it is a sloppy
|approach.

	I take exception to it being "hard to argue that this strategy 
	has been a complete failure".  What I see is an industry that has
	forgotten its brief past, ignored any research done more than ten
	years ago, and is constantly moving from fad to fad.

	Over 25 years ago IBM published data (I only have a copy of a
	final published chart) illustrating that doubling the size of
	a program quadrupled the cost of developing that program -- and
	this held true regardless of the programming language used.
	Therefore, IMHO, today's baroque software is not only a complete
	failure, but a fiasco.  I believe that baroque is a synonymn for
	broke.  This bloated software is (generally speaking) noted for
	substituting features no one really needs for the reliability that
	every serious user needs.

				Jerry

-- 
Jerry Gitomer at National Political Resources Inc, Alexandria, VA USA
I am apolitical, have no resources, and speak only for myself.
Ma Bell (703)683-9090  (UUCP: (until 4/15)  ...uupsi!pbs!npri6!jerry