Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 13:48:41 -0400 
From: "William M. Bumgarner" <wb1j+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: The Future Revealed.

Excerpts from netnews.comp.sys.next.misc: 14-Apr-92 Re: The Future
Revealed. by Derek Beatty@cs.cmu.edu 
> productivity), was wrong.  During the question period after the talk,
> one CS professor concurred, pointing out that his experience teaching
> an introductory course using Andrew was that the students who wrote
> code on their PC's did substantially better work than those students
> who used Andrew.

An interesting point, but some clarification should be made in regards
to a programmer's productivity on Andrew:

At CMU, the Andrew environment is really painful for programming-- it
used to be a custom window management sytem, but that was recently
(within the last three years) replaced w/X.

Take an undergrad-- put him into a computer class-- tell him to write a
piece of software.

If the undergrad chooses the PC, it is probably because he has had one
for some time and has some experience dealing with it-- especially at a
programatic level.

If the undergrad chooses Andrew (X), it is either because he has a Mac
and realizes it is going to take months to figure out how to get a
bloody window up on the screen, or else he has no machine and figures he
should dive into the Andrew environment because it is what 'everyone
else' seems to be using and he might as well learn it as well...

In general, the students who choose the PC over Andrew did so because of
experience.  This gives them an 'out of the box' advantage over the
student who is approaching Andrew/X because they need to get something
done.

The above observations are from personal experience (4 years in and out
of the undergrad program at CMU -- 2+ years to go :-).

Ob NeXT:

The NeXT proved just how awesome of a development environment it
provided in comparison to Andrew/Mac/PC's last semester.

Last semester, I took a computer graphics course at CMU.  During the
course, we had four assignments ranging from integer based line
drawing and polygon fills, a two-dimensional hierarchical editor
w/keyframe based animation, a 3D hierarchical modeller w/a camera
oriented paradigm, and a fourth project of our own design (I added
RenderMan support to #3).  We could choose any platform to implement
the projects.

One person chose a PC, several chose Macintoshes, most chose Andrew/X,
and there were at least five who chose the NeXT.

The NeXT based projects were far more flexible w/far better GUI's than
any of the others-- on Andrew/X, most people edited the graphics by
entering numbers into emacs and then re-running the display
application (Some people did actually implement UI's-- but they were,
for the most part, extremely primitive).

Beyond that for a couple of the NeXT programmers, it was there first
big application.  One of the people who chose NeXT (Thanks, Pete) had
never really seen the development environment outside of a few demos
and watching me hack-- his application looked every bit as good (and
worked very well) as the other NeXT programmers.  The professor was
impressed.

The NeXT environment is far superior-- both in ease of use and ease of
programming.  It is clear that the other companies are trying
frantically to catch up to the state-of-the-art that NeXT has defined.
What isn't so clear is what quality the other environments will
achieve-- trying to place all of that power and ease of use into an
existing system while trying to maintain some modicrum of
compatability must be utter hell.

just a thought...

b.bum

bbum+@cmu.edu    | But who can unlearn all the facts that I've learned
                 | As I sat in their chairs and my synapses burned
NeXT Developer   | And the torture of chalk dust collects on my tongue
  Support Temp   | Thoughts follow my vision and dance in the sun  -- PHISH

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