From: dillon@overload.Berkeley.CA.US (Matthew Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy
Subject: Re:  Attitudes: NeXT users and Sun users
Distribution: world
Date: 12 Aug 92 18:54:30 PST
Organization: Not an Organization

In article <rcbaab.713611483@rw9.urc.tue.nl> rcbaab@rw9.urc.tue.nl (Annard Brouwer) writes:
>dillon@overload.Berkeley.CA.US (Matthew Dillon) writes:
>>    That's pretty close to my own opinion.  P.S. NeXT (this is a
>>    suggestion), it would be a good investment to PAY software companies to
>>    port their PC programs to the NeXT.  Much of the software is quite
>>    portable but the impetus to port is not their for many companies due to
>>    the much smaller market the NeXT represents.
>
>No! NeXT if you're out there please don't listen... Look here, NeXTSTEP is
>quite elegant, but don't screw it up by "porting" programs from an inferior
>environment to our machine. This discussion of gaining a large program base
>to choose from is getting quite familiar with what happened to the Mac
>several years ago. I'd rather wait for some company to write a new program
>than to use a ported version. People who are familiar with the Mac should
>have noted that programs ported from Windows to the Mac just don't use the
>potential of the Mac. I'm terribly afraid that something like that might
>happen to NeXT.

    Porting a program written for an inferior environment does not infer
    that the program itself is inferior.  Get real!  Some of the most
    successful IBM-PC programs are, in fact, ported from UNIX and run under
    their own *custom* VM and multitasking subsystems... they basically
    throw away MS-DOS.

    I am not advocating a dumb-port.  Certainly a lot of work would have to
    be done ripping out the user interface and sticking in NeXT's, and
    certainly a lot of work would have to be done on the event loop.  You
    should note however that much of what the NeXT gives you is inherently
    asynchronous (removed from) an application and that the application
    interface to this stuff is normally synchronous, so it isn't as hard as
    you think.

>>    If possible, include in the deal rights to the source to said products
>>    for further development by NeXT (or whomever) solely for the NeXT
>>    station (so as not to compete with the software giants home markets)
>>    if/when the software giants decide to drop support for a particular
>>    product. [stuff deleted...]
>
>I wonder if you've tried to port code from a CLI environment to an event
>driven environment. Forget it, you end up wishing you'd started again from
>scratch...

    Huh?  You seem to think you know more about my life then I do.
    i.e. your comment has no backbone to it.

>Anyway, I think NeXT is getting more and more of the workstation market
>(albeit slowly). Remember that it takes some time for programmers to
>realise and use the potential NeXTSTEP offers.

    The UNIX workstation market is oriented towards raw power, period. 'How
    fast will this machine compile this' or 'how fast will it redraw the
    screen for that', or 'how fast will it simulate this' etc...  EVERYONE
    I know in industry says that it's the number one objective and are not
    about the replace a Sun sparc with half a dozen NeXT 040s.	NeXT knows
    this already, it's why NeXT concentrates in office automation where
    NeXTSTEP is better appreciated.  NeXT does understand the problem or
    they wouldn't be developing a RISC based workstation (if the rumors are
    to be believed).

    I'm just hoping they make the SCSI faster.  A PC/compatible (icky)IDE
    4MB caching controller with a Fujitsu 500MB drive attached to it is
    nearly instantanious, almost as fast as a ram disk.

					    -Matt

>Annard Brouwer,
>a happy (soon-to-be) NeXT user and formerly less-than-happy Mac user
>--
>| Annard Brouwer		 Bitnet 	    : rcgbbaab@heitue51
>| Dreef 74			 Internet	    : rcbaab@urc.tue.nl
>| NL-5504 LD  Veldhoven
>| The Netherlands

--

    Matthew Dillon	    dillon@Overload.Berkeley.CA.US
    891 Regal Rd.	    uunet.uu.net!overload!dillon
    Berkeley, Ca. 94708     ham: KC6LVW (no mail drop)
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