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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!fortune!phipps
From: phipps@fortune.UUCP (Clay Phipps)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: UN*X Orientation / Re: S1 & NCC
Message-ID: <3963@fortune.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Aug-84 16:41:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: fortune.3963
Posted: Tue Aug  7 16:41:08 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Aug-84 20:01:35 EDT
References: <3940@fortune.UUCP>
Organization: Fortune Systems, Redwood City, CA
Lines: 29

I have come to the conclusion that many of UN*X's shortcomings
derive from its creation by computer science and other *researchers*
as a system to support their research efforts.
These people are presumably primarily interested in their research,
secondarily interested in the software developed to support it,
and almost not at all in the more mundane aspects of software development,
such as documentation and standards, which impede production of "results"
and "stifle creativity".

It's great fun :-( trying to fix a UN*X-based compiler 
when all the documentation you have on it,
aside from the source code (thank generic deity that it's not written
in assembler or FORTRAN or COBOL), is a research paper written to
illustrate (but not describe) the "interesting" parts of a related compiler,
and a document based on empirical knowledge of the intermediate code.
Having the original developers actually *describe* the intermediate code
interface wouldn't be any fun for them, now would it ?
There are alleged to be some useful papers stashed away at Bell Labs.

Nonetheless, I can do a lot more with UN*X than I can with MS-DOS.

[These opinions are my own, and may not reflect those of my employer]

-- Clay Phipps

-- 
            { amd  hplabs!hpda  sri-unix  ucbvax!amd }          
                                                      !fortune!phipps
   { ihnp4  cbosgd  decvax!decwrl!amd  harpo  allegra}