Re: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On May 12, 3:17 pm, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de>
wrote:
> On 5/12/11 8:24 PM, Adam Beneschan wrote:
>
> > On May 12, 10:40 am, Rugxulo<rugx...@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> >>> Rather, adopting DOS seems quite
> >>> frankly the most far reaching mistake that computer dependent
> >>> industry has committed, the consequences being loss of both
> >>> software quality and---far worse---a collective loss of any knowledge
> >>> of what quality software might be!
>
> >> Not true. Quality software can be written on any OS. "A poor carpenter
> >> blames his tools." Many successful things have been written for DOS,
> >> not the least of which are Lotus 123, MS Word, Turbo C++, Turbo
> >> Pascal, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and a bunch of ports of GNU
> >> tools.
>
> That's a fine fallacy.  Many successful things have been
> written for X, therefore X must be good. (Think of char*.)
> Even when qualities can only be attributed to the efforts of
> very good carpenters tackling knot-holes and cracks in warped
> material.  The "argument" omits the detail that many successful
> things---and sometimes the very same things---have been written
> for other OSs, too. And it omits technical scales for measuring
> the qualities of technical systems such as operating systems.

That argument is itself a fallacy, because it's a strawman.  We
weren't arguing that DOS is "good".  At least I wasn't.  Rather, I was
trying to argue that DOS's goodness or badness can't be blamed for
poor quality of software written for it; you claimed that it did, but
you haven't made a case.

I've been in the programming business for 35 years and have worked on
a number of different platforms---different OS's, different
processors, and using different languages.  And in every case, I've
seen both good quality and horrible quality software.  The good
quality software is written by programmers with both understanding of
what it takes to produce good quality software, and an attitude that
makes them willing to spend the extra effort needed to produce it.
Programmers that lack one of these aren't going to write good quality
software.  And changing the OS that the programmer is working with
isn't going to change that.  A good programmer isn't going to suddenly
write bad code because he has to work on a worse OS.  I can imagine
that, in some cases, the lack of certain features may make it a little
more difficult to accomplish certain things; but a programmer with the
knowledge and attitude needed to write quality software will cope,
perhaps by setting up a building block of some sort (such as a
subroutine or some other tool) to make up for the lost feature.  (Most
of the software I've written just needs file I/O anyway.)  And
clearly, if a programmer does not have the knowledge needed to write
quality software, or has a careless attitude, moving to a better
quality OS is not going to rectify this at all.  (A better programming
language *can* help somewhat, I think, although I've certainly seen
plenty of hack code written in Ada.)  This is what I've seen in my
years in this business.  That's why the idea that adopting DOS
resulted in "loss of software quality" just makes no sense to me.

One argument you seemed to make was that DOS lowered users'
expectations, and that led to lower quality software.  I don't think
this makes sense either.  First of all, you cited Minix (based on
Unix) as an example of a higher-quality OS you would have preferred.
However, whatever advantages Unix has, user-friendliness is not one of
them.  And it makes no sense to me that a user who types in "copy
a.txt b.txt" to copy a file would have lower expectations but that
making him type "cp a.txt b.txt" would suddenly lead her to demand
higher-quality software.  But second, the PC came on the market right
about the time the public was ready for something like that, and
suddenly lots of people were buying home computers and they needed
software.  So whatever came out first would have been what they used.
Whatever poor-quality software might have been out there was probably
because it was written quickly and carelessly because there wasn't
anything else available.  I don't think DOS had anything to do with
that.  The situation would have been the same regardless of what OS
was picked for the PC.

So to sum up the points you made:

(1) "adopting DOS seems quite frankly the most far reaching mistake
that computer dependent industry has committed": as you pointed out
later, Coherent OS wasn't available until 1983 and Minix not until
1987---and I think it's likely no one would have spent the effort on
those if the PC hadn't already become wildly popular.  Anyway, since
there wasn't much out there in 1981, I don't think you can call it a
"mistake"---and especially not the colossal mistake you want to
portray it as---unless you can suggest a better course of action they
could have taken---and what would that be?  Put the PC back on the
shelf and bury it until someone wrote a better OS for it?

(2) a consequence of adopting DOS is "loss of ... software quality":
see above, I don't think this is true.

(3) a consequence of adopting DOS is "a collective loss of a knowledge
of what quality software might be".  Ummm ... this just seems silly.
Software quality has been improving, research into how to improve
software quality has been continuing, so a statement like this seems
more like a hyperbolic rant than a serious criticism.

Anyway, I think that's all I'll say on this.

                                  -- Adam