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From: philip@Kermit.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: MPW wish list
Message-ID: <1990Feb6.065019.22828@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 Feb 90 06:50:19 GMT
References: <71.25cdb0c2@waikato.ac.nz> <1990Jan23.065751.29303@peace.waikato.ac.nz> <1990Jan25.003918.2359@cs.UAlberta.CA>
Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 17

I find this discussion a bit disturbing. There's a consistant thread
that says, "Why isn't MPW more like unix?"

My question is, "Why is it so much like unix?"

I've used more programming environments than I care to remember, and the
LS environments are by far the biggest step forward in my experience.
MPW doesn't add anything to the state of the art; the LS environments do
for personal computing programming what the Mac did for the user. What I
would like to know is how an environment of the LS variety could best be
extended to provide the functionality of unix, without losing its low
learning threshold. My first thought is inspiration is to be found more
in environments like Smalltalk and Interlisp, which are more obvious
influences on the Mac style of computing.

Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu