More on Portability and the Ivory Tower (a tad long)

[Mike Hoegeman]

 >>Machine independent code does not imply teletype compatibility. There have
 >>been a range of machine-independent screen- and graphic- oriented
 >>environments (in order of increasing sophistication):
 >>	Termcap.
 >>	Curses.
 >>	X-Windows.
 >>	NeWS.
 >

 >Ya.  How many of those run on a Mac 

Well, THEY ALL run on an Mac II . AND Suns AND silicon graphics AND
vaxstations AND 386's. NeWS also runs on a regular Mac. The toolbox is
for Mac's. Period. This does'nt bother me all that much , I'd use it if
I thought it was best (I don't).  It bothers alot of others though.
that must put out a  product on a bunch of different machines.

 >and compete with the built-in
 >Mac routines for speed?  

The NeWS version for the Mac is plenty fast. Now nobody is under the
delusion that some mac program written with the toolbox functions
directly would'nt be faster. You can say the same thing about hand
coding everything in assembler (once you get good enough at assembler)
as opposed to doing it in those 'slow' languages like C and pascal.
Staying with the lowest common denominator to gain a little speed
has been proven over and over again to be a bad decision.

 >How much of your system's resources do
 >they consume?

It's true that NeWS chomps more memory than just using the toolbox,
etc..  but there's really no comparison as far as sophistication goes.
NeWS simply blows the mac programming interface clean out of the
water.  I've used both and it's torture using the mac stuff once you
get your hands on something like NeWS. people are willing to jam more
memory into their machine in order to run the latest version of
awesome-calc or spiffo-write. The toolbox is still back in the realm of
256k machines in it's outlook. Things like having to keep handles
around is really disgusting. Yes, it was necesssary at one point, but
that point should be long gone by now. In fact with the more
sophisticated programs like hypercard that are emerging i think the
savings produced by using the toolbox are becoming smaller and
smaller.


 >>> In all honesty, if the
 >>> application is that valuable then the odds are good that I 
 >>> would be willing to hold out for backward-compatible hardware.

 >>And so people build backwards-compatible hardware that cripples the NEXT
 >>generation of applications. Great thinking.

I don't think  backward compatible hardware is such a bad idea.
Does the 386 cripple the next generation of applications. Not that I
can see. It's a lot of hard work to do right though. Is it worth it?

>Ooooh, thanks.  I was hoping I would eventually get a snippy little reply.
>I was afraid this would go on for some time being a peaceful, intelligent
>discussion.   Backwards compatibility does not imply crippling future
>applications.  That your 80286 can run 8086 software does not seem
>to have crippled it from running system III Unix.  Yet, you are willing

Yow! system III unix! I'm drooling I'm drooling! :-)

>to cripple current applications in the name of portability.
>
>You're right, 'vi' is an excellent example.  I tried to teach a
>Mac programmer (with an MS from MIT) how to use it, and he
>thought it laughably brutal compared to even the most simple

>Mac editor.  Do you really prefer h,j,k, and l to using a mouse?

I love mice , but for simple text editing functions and cursor movement
the keyboard is better. If this was false why do all the mac programs
come chocked full of "clover-keys", macros etc..? because things that are
done over and over and over are faster from the keyboard. A good
combination of both is the best. Things like no  mouse based cut and
paste is  laughably brutal though. Unfortunately this is getting into
religion-war territory here so maybe I'll shut up at this point.

>Ed Driscoll
>The University of Michigan
>ejd at caen.engin.umich.edu

-mike