Re: [GD-General] Eiffel

[J C L. <cl...@ka...>]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2001 23:37:38 -0000 
Philip Harris <ph...@me...> wrote:

>> I won't work under Windows.  Not worth my time.  Not worth my
>> employer's time.  Can't see a reason to bother.  Not a religious
>> thing -- its just an environment which I consider and find
>> excessively difficult to be productive under, and without any
>> return value for that difficulty.

> Interesting, what in particular do you find so massively
> inefficienr?

Unusable UI (just try getting a decent window manager/GUI on
Windows...), excessive difficulty or inability to tailor/replace to
personal preferences (eg I don't allow icons on any system I run),
poor process model (eg no UI-exposed generic process IPC/sequencing
ala forks/pipes), unusable shell (even Cygwin's bash is crippled),
CLI opaque, single-user, intransigent authentication schema, poor
interop and integration with foreign systems (eg NFS, AFS, LDAP,
Kerberos, PAM, etc), fundamentally broken SMTP support (list owner
beef), interop unfriendly internal security semantics (eg ACLs on
dirs not files), end results of embrace-and-extend run rampant,
incompleat syscall interface, broken/unreliable POSIX supports,
consistent and uneditable RFC violations, network opaque at the host
and GUI and application level, poor tools (that (X)Emacs even runs
is a miracle), untrustable kernel, difficult and unfriendly to
automation, monolithic unified opaque API interfaces, code porting
unfriendly, resource consumptive, operation requires you to put your
body in front of the machine (side effect of being network opaque),
consistent assumption that the user will work and operate in the
manner and with approaches envisioned by MS (I don't).

A computer, and especially an OS is a tool.  Somewhere that got
lost, especially from an engineering viewpoint.  

More exactly it is a collection of tools and the capability and ease
of building new tools.  We're engineers -- that's what we do: build
and use tools.  Windows tends to assume that it is the tool,
singular.  I don't want a single tool -- that's a useless Swiss army
knife that does nothing well.  What I do want is a well built easily
operated tool box which makes it as easy if not easier to create and
use new tools as it is to use tools already in the box -- and
specifically one where the tool box is itself one of those tools and
is just as easily changed/replaced/rebuilt as an other tool in the
box.  

  If what I do is to build and use tools, surely my tools
  should support those activities?  Go into any good cabinet maker
  and you'll find that a large percentage of the tools were built
  right there by the cabinet maker for himself.  Ditto for a tool
  and die maker.  Even ditto for the North Sea fisherman I worked
  with as a lad, or the sailors crewing the yachts in the harbour.

Trying to leverage that (to me obvious and
how-could-you-do-otherwise) approach on Windows (when I've tried or
watched others try) has always been a recipe for disaster and pain.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
cl...@ka...               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.