Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!thirdi!peter
From: peter@thirdi.UUCP (Peter Rowell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Portability and Profitablity
Summary: As long as it's POSIX conforming, who cares?
Keywords: portability, hype, red herrings
Message-ID: <415@thirdi.UUCP>
Date: 25 May 88 01:02:34 GMT
Reply-To: peter@thirdi.UUCP (Peter Rowell)
Organization: Third Eye Software, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 23
References:


Speaking as a software developer who wants his code to run on as many
machines as possible (or to port easily to many machines), the whole
thing with OSF just doesn't matter.

You *know* that they will be POSIX conforming or else they won't be
able to bid on those nice, fat government contracts.  If you write code
that uses a local feature put in by a manufacturer, *you* are the one
guilty of non-portable code.  This goes just as much for a "special"
feature in BSD or System V as it does for OSFix (or whatever they're
going to call it).

You might think of these "features" as a type of drug: they have attractive
aspects (I guess) and they seem to be cheap (at first), but you *know* better
than to use them becaue Mom said "Beware of proprietary features, because
they'll rot your brain and make your code pure hell to port!"

Mom knew what she was talking about!

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Peter Rowell				"Yes, Mother....."
Third Eye Software, Inc.		(415) 321-0967
Menlo Park, CA  94205			...!pyramid!thirdi!peter