From: mlelstv@specklec.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (Michael van Elst)
Subject: Re: Going to the metal
Organization: Max-Planck-Institut f"ur Radioastronomie
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 23:03:37 GMT

In <um11wB1w165w@lakes.trenton.sc.us> rock@lakes.trenton.sc.us (Rockerboy) writes:
>into the conservative programmers club.  I can so little other 
>explanation for such vehement opposition to anything which would 
>drastically cut down on development times for newcomers.  This isn't 
>politics, Mr. Van Elst, it is science, as many people in this newsgroup 
>would do well to remember.

Hmm, if I remember correctly you called it _art_ :) I call it 1% art
and 99% engineering.

BTW, especially _newcomers_ will _benefit_ from using an OS since it is
so much _simpler_ to write programs using existing tools and utilities.
And it already exists :)

A hardware.library is for those 'coders' that either don't want to
buy documentation or that are too lazy to learn what an OS is (maybe
it reminds them of school).
Knowledgable coders won't use such a library anyway as it isn't optimized
for their special purpose or just because they didn't write it themselves.

>I never said it was a matter of metaphysics of philosophy.  I said you 
>behaved as if _you_ had looked into a Mirror of Simple Order.  It turns 
>you into a boring, lifeless, totally average, conservative, uncreative 
>boor.

Hehe, maybe because you didn't find anything interesting or creative in
writing programs. Cycle counting is indeed incredibly boring and I try
to avoid that as often as possible.

>> Finding out what program will work, will not work or even crash in what
>> situation is not my first goal and I left that to the theoretic computer
>> science people some years ago.

>And what has this to do with the hardware.library consideration?  Nothing 
>at all, I suspect.

It has. If you did read my posting you would know that the worst thing that
can happen is a bunch of similar but incompatible libraries. The demo coder
will probably use only one of them but the people that want to look at
a demo have to install a new library everytime they want to look at a different
demo.

Ah, I forgot that you simply boot from the demo disk which has the needed
library installed. But tell me how far this is different from having the
code directly in your program ? And why should C= bother to write a demo
'coders' toolkit when it isn't used anyway ?

And why should I bother to boot from a disk when I want to look at a demo ?
Bootable demo disks are for computers in a window display.

>> That's simply because tracker programmers have little imagination.
>> They can't look beyond their next idea.

>Cheap insults now?  It has much less to do with the programmers than the 
>musicians.

I'm not talking about the music or the musicians. Sorry, if I used the
wrong words. Music is a matter of taste and I won't argue that.

I'm talking about the mod players and their programmers.

>Intuitionised, and thus, an ongoing screamfest over the 'best interface' 
>seemed a bit pointless.  I was promtly handed my head...;)  )

I also didn't talk about the best interface or an interface at all.
But when I need several dozen MOD players (selected from all the crashing
players) which need to get updated monthly to play an arbitrary MOD (and a
wrong player wouldn't even tell me that but simply play part of the MOD
wrong) I can't enjoy their work.

>That is completely rediculous.  The situation has to do with many people 
>working on trackers who were not working together.  Each group 
>implemented changes to add features, just like everything, even word 
>processors, do.  Would you have me believe, now, that if you and I both 
>took a version of program X, and added features independantly of one 
>another, that, provided we were 'by the book programmmers', our projects 
>would be compatable beyond their basic structure?  They would not.  The 
>only alternative would be to create an IFF.  I would suggest you check 
>your definitions for _format_.  I believe you are referring to a 
>_standard_, not a format.

Correct. I'm talking about a standard. There's little use in having a
nonstandard format if lots of people work on similar things. The standard
already existed but I fear it was too difficult to understand by the 'coders'.
Using the scheme used on the C64 (and then ripping the first player code and
extending it in every little direction) was probably easier. But this
_caused_ the chaos of today. Writing programs for the public however has
little to do with 'easiness for the programmer'. It has something to do
with 'easiness for the user'.

And even with a non-standard format you can try to anticipate so that
the format does not need to get changed too often. This has something to
do with abstract data modelled after the information that needs to be
stored (instead of dumping the memory representation of the data into a
file).

Regards,
-- 
Michael van Elst
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                                "A potential Snark may lurk in every tree."