Re: Unix Haters

["Dr.Dmitry A.Kazakov" <dmitry@atm.fh-luebeck.de>]

ian@rsd.bel.alcatel.be (Ian Ward) wrote:

>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.

Yes. I worked under VMS on a machine with a hard drive that stopped 
several times per day. When I fired it up, nobody lost his edit
session. This is far beyond of reach of any UNIX.

>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.

I agree.

>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.

Again yes.

>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?

Nothing, because neither MS-DOS nor Windows is an operating system.

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

Today things look better (gcc+gnat). Although it cannot be compared 
with VMS (LSE editor and debugger for all languages, sigh).

>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.

Yes, but "requires little support"? Every day I must something
configure. And these thousands of configuration files that migrate
from one directory to another when a new OS version come ...

>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.

The main pain is that the question is not "Unix or VMS (or better
a new modern OS)", but "Unix" or "MS-Windows (2000)". And it seems
to me that "MS-Windows" will win!

That will be the end of the world. (:-()

Regards,
Dmitry