Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!bukys
From: miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Tired C programmer (Really configuration files)
Message-ID: <1989Apr30.183925.19847@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 30 Apr 89 22:39:25 GMT
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 50


    Date: 29 Apr 89 18:46:54 GMT
    From: roberts@studguppy.lanl.gov (Doug Roberts)

    Seriously, system admin on a Symbolics LISPm is a serious headache
    compared to Sun system admin. The networking software is not as
    sophisticated (yes, I _do_ know about Sun's infamous YP); 

Actually, I'd say it's more sophisticated: the lispms employ "transparent
networking" which is considerably more efficient than UNIX. editing/copying
a file on the lispm, e.g. from the INTERNET is (for the user) the same as
editing copying locally. You don't run FTP, then copy the file, then edit
it... and that's a trivial example.

    the
    documentation for the various configuration files is sketchy; 

Granted, some are. I've never had a problem decoding them. You see, you have
the source code to look at...

	you
    would miss the tools like grep, awk, & piping.

The current release includes a grep-like tool (find string; find symbol)
which does roughly everything grep does, and lets you restrict it to a
system or package and of course the editor has more powerful search tools
than grep; as for awk and piping, who needs additional languages?  When I
need e.g. the output of one function to be the input of another, I write it
that way in lisp to a lisp listener, and I don't need to know yet another
shell language to do it. You just get used to writing a lot of two-liners to
do stuff; if you find yourself doing some particular thing often enuff, put
it in your init file. (You can even make it a "command").

I do site admin at our site for both Symbolics and Explorer hosts, including
their interface to the UNIX world. This for roughly a dozen lisp machines,
and I do it in roughly 10% of my weekly time[*] (the rest spent on what I
*really* do here). Contrarywise, back when we had that many UNIX machines
(Sun 2/120s and Vax 750s) we had two full time UNIXoids doing site admin on
them. Admitably, we now have even more UNIX machines, but really only one
environment (Sun 3); we still have 1.5 full timers doing UNIX maintainance
and a manager. I'm handling two environments in *much* less time than that,
and expect no real problems should we get, for example an XL400 which
requires different binaries than the 3600 series.

[*] I won't make a completeness comparison; the hand holding the UNIX admins
do is much greater than what I supply.

----
Brad Miller		U. Rochester Comp Sci Dept.
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...allegra!rochester!miller}