Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dasys1!alexis
From: alexis@dasys1.UUCP (Alexis Rosen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Fourth Dimension, is it any good? - Yes! (No!)
Message-ID: <5883@dasys1.UUCP>
Date: 5 Aug 88 09:00:04 GMT
References: <5725@dasys1.UUCP> <61371@sun.uucp> <5768@dasys1.UUCP> <578@lindy.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: alexis@dasys1.UUCP (Alexis Rosen)
Lines: 98

In article <578@lindy.Stanford.EDU> liemandt@lindy.Stanford.EDU (Joe Liemandt) writes:
>Well, Mr. Rosen (aka "the Basher") strikes again. First it was 
>Hypercard (unusable in its current state), then SUM (not only was 
>the product unusable but the programmer should be shot) and now 4th 
>Dimension (bad product and Acius sucks too). I guess that FoxBase is 
>the only good program in the whole world.

I never said that HyperCard was unusable. Read the posting again. I like
HC a lot. It does have some problems, though. I never said SUM was unusable
either. I said that if you use the partition utility, you'll lose data.

>[says he likes 4D]
>I take some exception to a few (well, most actually) of your 
>complaints and or "suggestions". Most of them fall into the category 
>of not using a product like it was meant to be. Sort of like 
>complaining that the disk optimizer in SUM didn't work like the one 
>in Disk Express. [etc.]

I never said anything about the disk optimizer. To paraphrase Rich Siegel
(who was flaming me at the time) If you're going to flame, aim at the target...

>Your complaints:
>
>1) Acius is lazy  - This is probably the one that ticked me off 
>enough to write this response. Their tech support is the best I have 
>ever seen.  They routinely work seven days a week, [etc.]

They have to do so much tech support because their product is so weak and
their manuals are worse than any DB manuals I have ever seen (I've seen many).
Even worse than Omnis 3+'s, which were the previous champs.

>You also indicated that they are not improving the product. This is 
>an attack on Laurent (the 23-year old genius behind 4d) and probably 
>stems from the fact that they have not shown you the new version 
>under development (I wonder why?) This new version (no release date 
>set) will blow you away. Has almost everything. Stop by their booth 
>at MacWorld and see it.

I'm not attacking Laurent. I'm attacking the insane notion that one man can
do all the coding to make 4D a good product. Look what happened with Blyth,
trying to keep Omnis current with only one programmer in England working on
it. In fact, the parallels are interesting...

I'm not interested in the new version until I have it. They won't ship it
because it's not ready. They promised it eight months ago. THAT's what
bothers me.

>3) Slow speed - This seems to be the first thing out of everyone's 
>mouth. 4D is slow at importing. But in everyday use, 4D is fine. It 
>is always nicer if a program is faster, but for entering, modifying,
>and searching for data 4D is acceptable on the speed front.

Acceptible? By who's standards? 4D is one of the slowest, most inefficient
programs I have ever seen on ANY machine. If you disagree, tell me why. I
know that my clients, no matter how much they like the Mac, will take a
PC running paradox (or RBase, or Condor, or...) over a Mac running 4D, because
for roughly equivalent machines, 4D is ten to a hundred times slower that the
others. That's my real-world benchmark...

>As far as programming, 4D's interpreter is very fast, and if for 
>some reason it isn't you can easily link in some C or Pascal 
>routines you wrote.

Fast? It's about the same speed as Omnis. That makes it a couple hundred times
slower than my Apple II running interpreted basic. That's rediculous!
At any rate, Pascal and C cannot be used to manipulate the database.

>The rest of your complaints fall into the "why doesn't 4d work like 
>Foxbase" category. Use 4d the way it was supposed to, work with the 
>product instead of fighting it and you will see its power.
>
>Joe Liemandt
>Stanford University

This is really the crux of the matter. I didn't pay $700 to program their way!
I want to do it the right way. If you think I've got the time to fight with
a product guess again. I will do things logically and if the program fails to
perform in a reasonable manner, I've got no time to mess around (after all,
I'm too busy reading netnews! :-)

Instead of blind worship, try to make 4D do something really interesting.
Something which involves more than a trivial amount of code and data. You
can do it, if you're clever enough. But I can write ten interesting applica-
tions in the same time in a better environment, such as FoxBase. They'll run
better, too, and ten or a hundred times quicker.

Before charging off to 4D's defense, you might also take a look at the
alternatives. FoxBase is by no means perfect... but in comparison to 4D,
it often feels that way...

I have no affiliation with FoxBase or Acius (in case anyone has forgotten :-)

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