Re: Unix Haters

[ian@rsd.bel.alcatel.be (Ian Ward)]

James McIninch writes >

> you write for those, not because they're powerful, efficient, easy to work
> with, etc., but because people will buy your stuff. If you write large-scale
> projects for mission-critical applications in networked environments, chances
> are pretty good you'll work with UNIX, which has the greatest market share
> for that sort of thing.

That is more to do with the fact that mostly graduates work in
those areas. The were weaned on Unix which was really cheap for
their college to buy (or free,) and they did not want to use
anything else when they left, twenty years on, and the graduates
now order equipment and stock. 

I see a lot of the people who these days saying VMS is crap and 
difficult to use, but a lot (not all) have not even used it, and
some of those that have not ventured past DCL.

These two operating systems, to me, define the differences between
something that had to be sold, and something that was never
originally designed to be. I am not taking away from the unix team
there are as many clever, nifty, things in Unix, as there are in
the Fiat 500. I am also not saying I cannot use it successfully
either, I have tolerated it now for a few years.

What I am saying is that :

1. Its not reliable, no operating system worth its salt could
have a list of bugs in its manual tables without making serious
attempts to fix them in future releases. This can not now be done
because of the huge numbers of people who have worked on it over
the years, there are reams of software that depend on the bugs.
It is like a bad golfer aiming right to correct a slice,
rather than addressing the root problem.

2. It is not efficient. Ok, so loads of people are bound to argue 
with this one. You'll say, as I have heard hundreds of times before
that you can solve any problem in ten different ways. This, in my
eyes is not efficiency, because it simply means that nine out of the
ten solutions are not as efficient as they could be.

3. Its utilities are not intuitive either, grep, as was quoted
in an earlier article as being a good unix utility, cost me a
weeks work last year, when it could not find simple strings in
a catenation (admittedly massive) series of files. As for tar,
well, the most hilarious thing is that people who use it daily
think it is quite good.

4. One sees few books on comparative strengths and weaknesses
of say, MSDOS and VMS, but there are acres of unix books in
existence comparing unix to MSDOS. What does this say about
its power?

5. It only supports one language, (really.)

6. It is cheap, which is why it succeeded, and it is so simple
(requires so little support) that it will run on anything.
Though I wish it truly supported VMS's asynchronous system traps
in all their power, (and messaging, and command definition)
but it doesn't.

7. It is cheap, like a cheap whore, but I can cope with that,
and as an engineer, I find some of the things it does quite
clever, but I would rather work with an heavily engineered 
operating system that has cost money to develop, and works,
than one which no matter how clever it is, and it is clever,
always leaves you with the feeling that the highly stressed
nature of its solutions are just about ready to crack.

Best regards,

---
Ian Ward's opinions only : ian@rsd.bel.alcatel.be
Just in case you play golf and noticed the mistake, the golfer
I was talking about is left handed, and works in Tayntons
solicitors in Gloucester.