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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac programmers shortage?
Message-ID: <21020@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Tue, 29-Sep-87 18:50:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.21020
Posted: Tue Sep 29 18:50:29 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Oct-87 01:04:47 EDT
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Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
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Someone I couldn't reply to said:
>Maybe I'm missing the point, but what makes the Mac so difficult that it
>requires "Mac programmers".  Seems to me that anyone who has hacked on
>any "real" OS (e.g. Unix) should be able to handle the Mac with his/her tab
>key tied behind his back :-).

I think this deserves an answer since I write for both.  The best way
answer is with a metaphor:  Think of a knife: 

(a) it has a handle that is most of the volume of the knife.

(b) it has a blade that is most of the remaining volume of the knife

(c) it has an edge, which is the thing that does the actual cutting,
the edge is what the knife is for.

algorithms are like the edge of the knife.  For example, the algorithm
of a terminal program is:
doInParallel{
  if(ThereIsACharFromKeyBoard())
	SendItToSerialOutputPort();
  if(ThereIsACharFromSerialInputPort())
	SendItToScreen();
}

Both the unix terminal program "cu" and a Mac terminal program like
versaterm have this algorithm at their heart.  The unix software
provides a little of the "blade" in the form of a few command line
options. 

By comparison, take any piece of mac software and scan throught the
menu items and dialogs to see what is going on there. The
functionality is huge compared to the Unix equivalent.

Also, proper mac software is higher quality that most of the software
delivered with Unix.  In general, Mac software handles
out-of-main-memory, and out-of-disk-space conditions gracefully. Most
Unix programs just crash under these conditions.

Please excuse me, I'm just a little annoyed at the moment. I was on
the phone and I needed to look at a file on my Sun running X windows.
I've got a stiff neck, so I needed one hand to hold the phone, and I
couldn't get my X workstation to do anything unless I used a second
hand to hold down the "meta" key while I was using a third hand to
left-mouse-button on the item I wanted. (I eventually used my elbow.)

Yesterday, our VAX Unix crashed because one of its hard disks got
full, and a new SCSI disk was delivered for one of our Suns. Each
required enough file system surgery so that my entire work day was
spent dealing with them. The equivalent tasks on a Mac would have
taken a half hour at most.

Do you see the difference? On the Macintosh, I spend a long time
getting it right, so it won't crash and will be easy to use. On Unix,
the system was hacked together so it sort of works, and you have to
spend a long time cleaning up after it.

--- David Phillip Oster            --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
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