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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Initial Opinion of Amiga
Message-ID: <1317@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Wed, 19-Nov-86 22:28:46 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1317
Posted: Wed Nov 19 22:28:46 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Nov-86 02:39:30 EST
References: <939@blia.BLI.COM> <3917@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 22
Synopsis: Why be deliberately different?


Jon Forrest brought up a lot of good nits about the Amiga.
Sure, if you are a raving wild lunatic hacker like many of us,
you can adjust to the idiot-syncracies of any system, and even
vehemently defend them against the infidels on inferior systems.

But among ourselves, couldn't we admit that Yet Another Way to name
files in a hierarchical file system is one more way too many?  Couldn't
we (except RMS) admit that while ^S and ^Q flow control has its vices,
it does have many virtues and is universally known?  Couldn't we, who
all think regular expresions are great, settle on ONE form of regular
expressions?  (Admittedly, Unix has two, but AmigaDos could aspire
to be better than Unix, instead of just different.)  Could we agree
that a file system design which makes file opens fast at the expense of
slow directory reads might benefit from a redesign?  Can we recognize
that having no clean way to kill a task without crashing the system is
something that requires attention?  And could we stop calling a command
language of typed commands which start up programs from a file system
an "advanced user interface"?
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
    "I can't think of a better way for the War Dept to spend money than to
  subsidize the education of teenage system hackers by creating the Arpanet."