From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,6192a34d0c9ffe5b X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!x38g2000pri.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Adam Beneschan Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: DOS, was Re: Ada Tutor Web Site Shutting Down Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 18:21:29 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <6a58fecb-6e46-4eca-be03-679a40836c3e@x38g2000pri.googlegroups.com> References: <7f53de8e-2400-4c87-a818-0b389e117c42@e21g2000yqe.googlegroups.com> <2aeab5d1-fa6d-47de-ab53-9a8e6ab5f27a@h9g2000pre.googlegroups.com> <3a6f1fc2-3ae0-42d9-b483-d16cf7ab1566@x8g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <991499fb-bc24-4d7e-baf6-a9c0e16333e6@k22g2000yqh.googlegroups.com> <291504a4-ec55-45f1-bf7f-13078bf71c3e@m10g2000yqd.googlegroups.com> <4dcbf260$0$6992$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> <3bae2d75-31b0-4a88-b655-bd657921d15c@z7g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <4dcc5c75$0$6891$9b4e6d93@newsspool2.arcor-online.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.126.103.122 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1305336090 2255 127.0.0.1 (14 May 2011 01:21:30 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 14 May 2011 01:21:30 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: x38g2000pri.googlegroups.com; posting-host=66.126.103.122; posting-account=duW0ogkAAABjRdnxgLGXDfna0Gc6XqmQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618; .NET4.0C),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:20236 Date: 2011-05-13T18:21:29-07:00 List-Id: On May 12, 3:17=A0pm, Georg Bauhaus wrote: > On 5/12/11 8:24 PM, Adam Beneschan wrote: > > > On May 12, 10:40 am, Rugxulo =A0wrote: > > >>> 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. =A0Many 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. =A0The "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