VMS vs. UNIX file system

[Dave Arnold]

eric at snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
> In article <13608 at mimsy.uucp>, chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
> > (Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer rewrote the B news software and got
> > a similar order of magnitude performance increase, without changing
> > the file formats at all.)
> 
> [...]
> 
> The principle exemplified here bears repeating yet again:
> 
> 	A CLEAN DESIGN IS THE ROYAL ROAD TO SPEEDY CODE
> 

I couldn't agree any more.  People I work with seem to get bogged down
in the "How big of a QIO can I do" syndrome during early early program
design and development.  I really protest this (especially when they
encourage me to do the same).  One of the reasons why I am a *GREAT*
:-) programmer...is...because...: I much prefer to view things in the
most simple way.  I actually go to great effort rewriting things
(with my bosses glare $$$) just to acheive a simpler program design.
Sometimes the rewrite achieves better performance (not intentionally).
And if not, facilitates easier performance enhancements---But I save
those for last.

This is the thing that I love about UNIX so much that I wish VMS
shared: SIMPLICITY.  Everything is so damn simple, it goes right
over some people's head.  Now if UNIX only had AST's, timer queues,
exception handling, and a better "SHELL"---I would be in heaven.

Remember the days when we would bring monolithic
straight-line code to bed with us, and make marks on the listing?

I even remember back in the late 1970's my boss teaching me the
cons of structured programming by explaining to me that a function
call just turns into a JMP instruction :-)  This is the 80's!!!
Soon to be 90's!! Let's not get stuck in the dark ages!
-- 
Dave Arnold
dave at arnold.UUCP	{cci632|uunet}!ccicpg!arnold!dave