From: martelli@cadlab.sublink.org (Alex Martelli)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: HP and windows NT
Date: 14 Oct 92 09:29:36 GMT
Organization: CAD.LAB S.p.A., Bologna, Italia

dpayton@qcinet.Gwinnett.COM (Doug Payton) writes:
	...
:>If the developers are
:>samples of "homo economicus", they'll develop where they project
:>maximal [ (present-value discounted) revenue minus (p-v d) costs ].
	...
:Now, ya' see, we do agree on this.  You've pretty much summed up my view
:that tools, while important, are not the be-all and end-all decision for
:platform choice.  

Yes, it does seem as if we're mostly in violent agreement.  You did play
down the potentially gigantic value of good tools, as well as omit my
remarks on a tech person's very respectable desire for non-economic job
satisfaction, but I never thought that tool quality can be the ONLY
reason for platform selection to the exclusion of ALL other considerations
(platform cost, training costs, platform's suitability for deployment
of target application, and so on); indeed, I NEVER heard anybody maintain
such a strawman position as you appear to be arguing against.


:>Excellent tools are generally gradually ported from the platform they are
:>first available on to other ones.  
:
:Let's see how long it takes Perl to be ported to the HP3000, to test
:this theory.  :-)  Actually, with MPE going POSIX, that -may- not be
:all that far off.  

Since perl HAS been ported to such poor platforms as MS-DOS, it's
certainly not a technically overwhelming problem to get it onto HP's
proprietary OS, if a need is perceived - just look at how REXX spread
from VM, to MVS, to DOS, to OS/2, to Amiga's Intuition, to Unix, to
OS/400, and so on, for example (and some of these were from-scratch
reimplementations, as opposed to portings, since the REXX interpreter
was originally coded in 370 Assembler Language; perl, coded in C, is
an easier problem).  You should probably check on comp.lang.perl for
specifics, though.

:Agreed.  I'm thinking more of the overall decision by a company to
:develop a product.  Of course, the techie will probably lean toward the
:tools, but an educated and informed techie will certainly acknowledge
:the other pressing matters.

Sure - I can see why a SW house with a mixed VMS/Unix installed base
would target OpenVMS as first porting target for DEC's new Alpha-based
boxes, for example (existing Unix customers have better existing growth
paths, while VMS ones can hardly wait for top-notch price-performance
and so WILL upgrade ASAP, and so on), OR viceversa (not much risk of
installed-base erosion to competitors in the VMS world, far hotter
competition in the Unix world and thus a higher premium on shortest
possible time-to-market, higher potential for expansion beyond installed
base, and so on again).  The quality of tools that will be available on
Alpha boxes for OpenVMS versus OSF/1 versus NT *is* a crucial component
in the equation (which it IS the techie's job to point out and highlight
at length), but never the ONLY term in said equation.

-- 
Email: martelli@cadlab.sublink.org                   Phone: ++39 (51) 6130360
CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Ronzani 7/29, Casalecchio, Italia   Fax: ++39 (51) 6130294 
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp