Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!uwvax!uwslh!lishka From: lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Fish-Guts) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Cynic's Guide to SE #6: Forthcoming Revolt Message-ID: <388@uwslh.UUCP> Date: 3 Oct 88 13:48:17 GMT References: <3969@enea.se> Reply-To: lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Fish-Guts) Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison, State Hygiene Lab Lines: 90 [Excuse my writing, as it may be a bit incoherent. I managed to get less than an hours sleep last night, and am feeling a bit fatigued. Aren't college computer science classes fun? ;-) ] In article <3969@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes: > >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. You should look again, a little more closely. Personal computers have matured a great deal since the dawn of the PET and Apple II. >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? Yup, program development tools are becoming as good or better than many UNIX tools. Take the Amiga, for instance (it is the one I am most familiar with): it has several versions of emacs, vi, diff, grep, compress, make, shells (both cshell workalikes and others) with input-line-editting, etc. There are source-level debuggers available (apparently with the power of dbx), two nice C compilers (one which mimics much of the functionality of UNIX cc), modula compilers, lint, etc. There are "batch files" (the near-equivalent to shell-scripts), file protection bits, file dates, task spawning commands, etc. As you can see, personal computers are coming of age. The development environments are becoming robust, and with the added advantage of a good windowing interface, personal computers are beginning to rival the old glass-tty/Vax/Unix/Gnu-Emacs/ksh standard (at least in *my* book! ;-). The only thing I really miss is memory protection, but hey, OS/2 is supposed to provide that (and everything else, including the kitchen sink). In short, personal computers are becoming small workstations in their own right. >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? Depends on the comparisons. The original poster complained (and rightly so) about outdated micros or mainframes and work vs. the latest, greatest personal computers which people are buying and finding more functional. Now, if schools and companies kept up with the times (and some of them do), students and programmers would have access to the latest and greatest larger computers, and then maybe they wouldn't want to program at home so much. As a side note, here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison the Computer Science Departments hardware has changed drastically in the last few years. I used to program on overloaded PDP-11's and VAX 750's; now we use IBM RT's (which are a bit slooow), Macintoshes, HP 9000's, Microvaxes, IBM PC's etc. Our department seems to have tackled the old equipment situation and has greatly improved the hardware. The software isn't too shabby either (typically UNIX, sometimes running X-Windows). >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. Welllll, I used to play rogue a lot on the VAX/UNIX system here at work until I got a shareware version of Larn for my Amiga. Let's see, VAX-rogue has black-and-white character graphics, a 9600 baud transfer rate, can only be used with a keyboard, and is subject to variations in "the Load Average (!)", whereas Amiga-Larn has eight-color beasties, much faster transfer, uses the mouse, and the only person on the machine is 'lil ol' me! No contest.... >Erland Sommarskog .oO Chris Oo. -- Christopher Lishka ...!{rutgers|ucbvax|...}!uwvax!uwslh!lishka Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene lishka%uwslh.uucp@cs.wisc.edu Immunology Section (608)262-1617 lishka@uwslh.uucp ---- "...Just because someone is shy and gets straight A's does not mean they won't put wads of gum in your arm pits." - Lynda Barry, "Ernie Pook's Commeek: Gum of Mystery"