Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!decwrl!adobe!heaven!glenn
From: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: PostScript Language
Message-ID: <147@heaven.woodside.ca.us>
Date: 24 Feb 90 08:09:51 GMT
References: <9447@imagen.UUCP> <38910@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: glenn@heaven.UUCP (Glenn Reid)
Organization: Skyline Press, Woodside CA
Lines: 73

In article <38910@apple.Apple.COM> kchen@Apple.COM (Kok Chen) writes:
>ib@apolling (Ivan N. Bach) writes:
>>Have you ever heard of a proposal for a new world standard for the storing
>>and transmitting of image data that wastes up to 90% of the communication
>>channel's capacity? 
>>Ivan N. Bach                      Tel (408) 986-9400, x508
>>QMS, Inc.                         Fax (408) 727-3725 
>
>PostScript(R) became successful because it satisfied the needs of a lot 
>of folks with sufficiently deep pockets.  Instead of griping about what 
>a sicko procedural language it is, perhaps Ivan would care to propose one 
>of his favourites, and let the free market decide?
>Kok Chen			kchen@apple.com, AA6TY(ex-KK6DP)
>Apple Computer, Inc.

I think it's a lot simpler and a lot less pure than the free market
system or communications bandwidth.  I do think PostScript is successful
because it is an elegant design and it's wonderful and all that, but
that is neither necessary (unfortunately) nor sufficient for anything
to be successful, as we are all painfully aware.

No, I think PostScript succeeded mainly because it is ASCII.  People
can understand something that they can see.  People like that.  A lot
of the software in the world is screwed up in one way or another, and
people love to be able to fix things that are broken.  And they can
fix them if they are expressed in ASCII.  Or at least they can see
them and know that there is something broken in there that they can't
quite understand, so they want to know more about it.  So they learn
it, and have fun with it, and tell somebody else about it.

A hell of a lot more people know how to work text editors than
know how to read octal dumps.  You can drag graphic designers
and sales people (not to slight them, of course, but to pick some folks
who probably have never written any programs) into a classroom and
get them to print their names on a sheet of paper in 100 point Times
Roman in about 15 minutes.  Try to do that with a binary-encoded
token stream with packed arrays, 0-padded bytes, run-length
encoded bits, checksums, and end-of-file indicators.

Throughout the history of the computer industry, the computer people
start out designing something that is very clean, simple, elegant,
and efficient on the bottom, and by the time it gets to the user, it
is inconsistent, quirky, slow, incomprehensible, and ugly.  But
people buy it because there's nothing better, learn to live with
it because people are good at adjusting to things, and the
computer people think they've done something wonderful, so they turn
around and do it again, from scratch, and make it totally different
than the last one.  That's because computer people love the work they
are doing, and they would never want to do the same thing over and
over again, and besides, it can be made more wonderful!  I know that,
because I am a computer person.  But I've also watched people try to
use computers for years, and there's not a computer system on earth
that's as useful to a human being as a Makita cordless drill is to the
average carpenter.  Or if it is, somebody will suddenly change the
software on her to make it more wonderful, but it may not be able to
read all of her data files; sorry.

Anyway, PostScript is great because you can see it, edit it, write
more of it, and even complain about it.  Most of us couldn't do any of
these things if it weren't ASCII.  So what if it takes a little longer
to get where it's going?  Besides, there are more MIPS and megabytes
every time you wake up.

There are people who care about whether a 100-page-per-minute printer
keeps up to its rated speed, and there are specialized solutions for
those people.  I value reliability and consistent output about 100
to 1 over speed.  That is, I'd rather have a 1 ppm printer that always
got the right answer, because I could go to sleep and have it print
the draft of my book, than have a 100 ppm printer that couldn't print
page 3 and wanted me to click "OK" when I woke up in the morning.

Glenn Reid
 (My own late-night thoughts, of course)