Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tytso From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: 0.9 Mathematica Message-ID: <11345@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Date: 11 May 89 19:28:27 GMT References: <11181@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <47558@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 38 In article <47558@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> J Greely writes: >>I don't think I'm doing >>anything wrong, but without source code I can't be sure. > >Well, this is the worst attempt at a reason for having source code >I've seen yet. In fact, I can't imagine what earthly good source code >(presumably for the Mathematica front end) would do you in this case, >particularly if you're not sure whether it's your problem or the >program's. RTFM before you BT(W)FN. You're right, I was probably being a bit too casual about source code. But then again, I haven't seen any documentation for it either. (OK, OK, there was the release notes --- but I don't consider release notes to be documentation --- and I didn't know about the Mathematica release notes at the time.) My experience is that the source code is much more reliable for determining how a program works; much more so than TFM. In fact, I'll prefer looking at the TFS, since I can usually wade through the source faster than I can wade through the manual. This may be saying something about the quality about most computer documentation. All I can say is that I hope that the NeXT's final documentation will be more informative than your average Mac documentation (which has close to zero information content). With source code, I can usually also fix problems much faster than going through normal channels. I would much prefer to fix the problem locally, and then send them a diff of the changes. As long as it works on my site, I don't care if it takes the n+plus weeks for it to wind its way up and down user support to the people who know what they're doing. If you think I'm just being impatient, may be I am. But then again, when people are combating things like the internet worm (or the anonymous ftp bug, or the Sun login bug, or the Ultrix login bug) time (and therefore sources) are important! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Theodore Ts'o bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso 3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139 tytso@athena.mit.edu Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!