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From: dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Reed College maturity
Message-ID: <1901@uwmacc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Jan-86 11:37:04 EST
Article-I.D.: uwmacc.1901
Posted: Tue Jan 14 11:37:04 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jan-86 05:58:11 EST
References: <21100021@orstcs.UUCP>
Organization: Historical Innovations
Lines: 102


> [Nathan C. Myers]
> While we're on the subject of excessive net traffic, it seems a good time
> to discuss the behavior of people at Reed College.

OK, lets.

> Specifically, the Mac community's first contact with them (that I know
> about) was the distribution of a fraudulently-labelled stolen copy of
> Lonnie Abelbeck's VersaTerm product.

I believe that there were some announcements regarding the availability
of Rascal and associated laboratory-control software prior to this
incident.

> Since then, we've seen at least a megabyte of piddly, useless programs and
> desk accessories written in Rascal.

I assume you are speaking rhetorically.

> It may be that Rascal itself is a 
> useful product, but the evidence so far is that its primary function is
> to consume net bandwidth for the aggrandizement of Reed students.

> To the people at Reed: I'm sorry to come down on you so hard.  Perhaps you
> could check with disinterested others to make sure your stuff is 
> worth posting before you do so.

Well, I don't wish to jump on you, but perhaps you should check with
others (like myself) before you post your own articles?

What *evidence* are you talking about?  Do you have evidence that these
programs are not used by anybody?  (That means proving a negative,
which I suppose might be difficult.  It's much easier to make
unsupported sweeping denigrations than to back up your charges, I
suppose...)  Have you ever used Rascal yourself?  Do you know anything
about it?  What wonderful non-piddly programs are *you* posting/writing?

Are the programs written in other languages that are posted on the
net generally piddly or non-piddly?  There's a lot of stuff that
comes across that I personally consider worthless, but I haven't noticed
any correlation between usefulness and language.  Nor is it true that
because you or I don't like something, nobody else will.

Some specific Rascal programs that I have found worthwhile:

Squirmterm:  Terminal emulator.  Simple, but small (33K), and I
don't need anything else.  I like it lots better than Red Ryder or
Kermit (admittedly I have not tried MacTerminal or VersaTerm, etc.)
I use it all the time, and I find that I'm not constantly aware of
things that it doesn't do that I wished it did.

IconMaker:  Does something most other programs don't (NONE others that
I know of, but just to be safe...):  it installs the edited icon in
the desktop, so you don't have to mess around in there yourself.

ReadMacWrite:  pulls text from MacWrite files.  Not an elaborate
task, to be sure, but very nice for converting files to run other
programs on, so that things such as word counters or other text
analysis things can be done.  I DO NOT like MacWrite's facilities
for writing text files.

DA's:  I agree with you that the posted DA's have not in the main
been useful.  But that has nothing to do with the language itself,
only with the choice of what to write a DA for.  What's relevant
for the programmer is that Rascal makes it WONDERFULLY easy to write
desk accessories.  You can write it, create the object, and test it
without ever leaving Rascal.  You can put it in the system too, but
that's not as robust.

Other programs written in Rascal:

Black Box:  I don't use this because it turns out to be an
unauthorized version of a trademarked/copyrighted game.  However,
it demonstrates that non-trivial programs can be written, and by
non-Reed people.

Rascal Billiards:  Try it and see (posted under the name Rascal
Collision Detection Animation, or something like that).

Here at the UW Primate Center Rascal is the only language I have,
and I'm not hopping up and down to get another language.  I've
found it useful for creating research software.  One of our
investigators also bought it and is using it in his labs.

My only gripe is that I wish they'd release the next version so
we could *use* it, instead of trying to fix every little thing!
I'd rather have the upgrade now and a third release later.
(Others I know feel the same way, Scott!)

In summary:  I like Rascal.  I like it A LOT.  And I don't even
like Pascal!

But (obviously) I am biased, so perhaps you will say of me that,
like Leon Croizat, "leprous has been my manner of thinking from
that day I was born."

-- 
                                                                    |
Paul DuBois     {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois        --+--
                                                                    |
   "We are all catastrophists now."                                 |