Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!fluke!mce
From: mce@tc.fluke.COM (Brian McElhinney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: programming environments (was: multitasking)
Message-ID: <6544@fluke.COM>
Date: 11 Jan 89 00:29:22 GMT
References: <6475@fluke.COM> <9831@drutx.ATT.COM>
Sender: news@tc.fluke.COM
Organization: SRS Recursive Software, Castrovalva, WA
Lines: 60

In article <9831@drutx.ATT.COM> clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward) writes:
>
>Can you come up with something important to do, which the present Mac 
>operating system _won't_ let you do?

Sigh.  The question is not what is *possible* or not.  We're talking software.
Almost anything is possible for a given architecture.  That doesn't mean it is
reasonable.  Try doing ray tracing, or 3D hidden-surface removal, or a CAD/CAM
all in little bitty pieces and contexts.  Possible, yes.  Now how long will it
take to write?  How robust will it be?  How responsive?  Now ask the same
questions for an implementation using process threads and semaphores.

There is no doubt that the present "event driven" Multifinder environment is
very useful, and works for a very large class of problems.  You will no doubt
have also noted that applications are getting larger.  And more complicated.
And slower.  And take longer to write and have more bugs.  It's a problem of
the additional complexity required, in both the application and in it's
implementation for the Mac OS (which has bent over backwards to maintain
backward compatibility; a wonderful thing, but it has it's price).

>We've disposed of the hobgoblins which haunt people who worry about what it
>might not do; such as allow background tasks time during dialogs, etc..  It
>does these things fine.

Your definition of a task is has some dismaying assumptions.

>I think the same is true of 'I want my Unix command line interface, pipes, 
>and utilities'.  With MPW, and especially the latest 3.0, it's quite apparent 
>that the Mac OS easily supports an at first similar appearing, but very much 
>superior interface:  'live scripts', with ever so many features you'd 
>really miss doing without.

Not much different than GNU Emacs under UNIX.  Not as good in some respects.
Emacs lets me bind any event sequence to customized actions, and is programmed
in Common Lisp (not Yet Another Shell Script).  And knowns to abort window
refreshes if a new update event comes along, and has filename completion, and
more.  MPW has it strengths as well; my point is that, having experience with
both, I feel it is not superior.

>Listening, it must be clear that people in the 'straight Unix' community, 
>especially new engineers and school people, have a constant murmur going with 
>just about as much unpleasant to say about Unix itself:  the most especially 
>preferred of all, 'not a real modern OS'.

Who ever said UNIX was 'a real modern OS' was probably in marketing.  It has
it's advantages; ever use a SUN for software development?  Overall, it beats
VMS and DOS and MacOS (MPW or LSC) by a mile.

MACH appears to be a big step in the 'modern' direction.  So does a rewrite of
the MacOS.  I look forward to both.

>That world might just be beginning to grow up, into the next phase at
>least.  Will computer programmers grow with it?

Yes, if they are willing to look outside their narrow environment and see that
the tools they are *used to* may solve their problem, but at a cost.
 
 
Brian McElhinney
mce@tc.fluke.com