From: bagwill@swe.ncsl.nist.gov (Bob Bagwill) Subject: Re: NT vs Linux (was: Re: truth or dare) Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1993 13:15:34 GMT
Parental Advisory (meshkin@sol.cs.wmich.edu) wrote:
: On 8 Jul 1993 18:15:19 GMT, Jerry Shekhel (jerry@msi.com) seemed to say:
: > Howlin' Bob (gt8134b@prism.gatech.EDU) wrote:
: > Well, maybe it's time to take a break from trying to advance the state
: > of the art. Maybe instead it's time to try to come up with something truly
: > useful -- something that pleases its users at least as much as it pleases
: ...
: One of the things that has irritated me for quite some time is all the
: theory people telling us how we have to make our code more "generic",
: "reusable" and "modular".
: ...
: Does anyone out there remember the kinds of things that used to be
: accomplished back in the days of the Commodore 64, Apple ][, etc?
: Remember when we only had 64K in the whole machine? Remember when
: a processor ran at a whopping 1MHz? Anyone remember 88K floppies?
: ...
: but I can also write a super-inefficient implementation of that heap
: sort which WILL fail to beat a nice quick assembly bubble sort.
Jeez Loueez! Not another unstructured self-modifying micro-optimized
assembler bigot. Program in microcode why dontcha! :-)
Notice that those machines are pretty much extinct. Crafty, crufty,
assembler only take you so far. To get the smallest fastest kernel for
a particular purpose, you need more modular code, not less. You can't
remove or replace the graphics code, for example, if it's written in
assembler and intimately intertwined with all the rest of the kernel.
What I think most users want is a super-easy to install, configure, and
maintain Linux. No programs that randomly coredump. No logfiles that
grow to infinity. If you want to change the name of your system, how
many files do you have to edit? If I want to create a single purpose
system (like a gopher server), how easy is it to configure?