Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!vsi1!altnet!uunet!mcvax!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Cynic's Guide to SE #6: Forthcoming Revolt
Message-ID: <3969@enea.se>
Date: 1 Oct 88 22:40:13 GMT
Organization: ENEA DATA AB, Sweden
Lines: 36


One thing is for sure: A PC, Macintosh or an Amiga can *look* much
more impressive than the old traditional monochrome screen connected
to VAX or similar. But you use them for different purposes, and if
we are talking software engineering, these boring glass screens win. 

Admittedly I have very little experience of PC software and none of
Mac or Amiga. No doubt you have better and nicer *application* software
available on these machines like tools for doing slides and documentation.
And since documentaion is a an important thing, this means these
machines can be of good help for that part of the work. And, at the
place I currently located, they have both VAXes and Macintoshes.

But for program development? Can these small machines give the 
same support for large-scale projects? I saw a demonstration of
the debugger for Turbo-Pascal, and I wasn't too impressed. Nice 
graphics, but it didn't seem to do better than the VMS debugger. 
Source-code control? Make?

I think that the conclusion that the computer at home does better 
than the one at work is little of a short-cut. You are looking too 
much at the surface. For mangagers and other people who mainly 
use application programs, the PC is a winner, but for a software
engineer?

A final comparison. For a while we had fun with the PC game "Leisure
Larry in the Land of Lounge Lizards". Nice graphics, true, but the
game as such became uninteresting since once you solved it, there 
were no variations. On the other hand, I still like from time to 
time playing nethack on this Unix machine. Simple ASCII for graphics,
not fancy at all, but the game as such has much more to offer than
Larry.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog            
ENEA Data, Stockholm         
sommar@enea.UUCP