Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!nuchat!peter
From: peter@nuchat.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Feeping Creaturism
Message-ID: <655@nuchat.UUCP>
Date: 16 Feb 88 11:53:12 GMT
Organization: Public Access - Houston, Tx
Lines: 44

I think that all of us, particularly those who are writing applications
programs for money, need be aware of the lesson UNIX teaches about
the utility of having many small programs each of which does one thing
only... but does it well.

Oh, sure, it saves a couple of K of 'C' runtime and common code to put
a pipe device into a console handler, or a terminal program into a shell,
or a keyboard macro handler into a directory utility... but only if you
use the extra functions.

Otherwise it costs a couple of K, or a couple of dozen K, to have two or
three copies of a pipe device... a macro handler... a terminal program...
a command language processor... or whatever else you have to drag around
when you prefer another version of whatever it is that you're using.

I thought editor/assemblers went out back when 1K monitors stopped being
state-of-the-art... now integrated environments that combine a weird
non-standard Pascal and a weird non-standard Wordstar variant are the in
thing. I know IBM PC users who actually fired up Turbo Pascal for doing
text editing.

On the Amiga this sort of thing shouldn't be necessary. There's plenty of
room for you to have your favorite editor (I like vi, and I think Emacs
only has one use: an example of why you don't want 400 people designing
a program... but other people think vi fits that very niche) and your
language (let's hear it for BCPL, now) and let them work together.

So what language comes with the Amiga? AmigaBasic: a huge combined Basic
interpreter and editor that requires so many files at run-time that I don't
think anyone without a hard disk keeps it in their workbench. I hear it's
a pretty good Basic. When I get a hard disk I might actually fire it up.

Then there's Zing! A directory utility keyboard macro handler who knows what
else package.

Oh well. There are, of course, exceptions. On the Amiga it looks like the
exceptions are actually the general rule. Let's keep it that way.

Boycott integrated packages. What do you need that stuff for, anyway? The
Amiga gives you an integrated *environment*...
-- 
-- a clone of Peter (have you hugged your wolf today) da Silva  `-_-'
-- normally  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter                U
-- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.