larus@KIM.BERKELEY.EDU (James Larus) (09/20/86)
OK, here are my comments on the Great Symbolics-Xerox debate. [As background, I was an experienced Lisp programmer and emacs user before trying a Symbolics.] I think that the user interface on the Symbolics is one of the poorest pieces of software that I have ever had the misfortune of using. Despite having a bit-mapped display, Symbolics forces you to use a one-window on the screen at a time paradigm. Not only are the default windows too large, but some of them (e.g. the document examiner) take over the whole screen (didn't anyone at Symbolics think that someone might want to make use of the documentation without taking notes on paper?). Resizing the windows (a painful process involving a half-dozen mouse-clicks) results in unreadable messages and lost information since the windows don't scroll (to be fixed in Genera 7). I cannot understand how this interface was designed (was it?) or why people swear by it (instead of at it). The rest of the system is better. Their Common Lisp is pretty solid and avoids some subtle bugs in other implementations. Their debugger is pretty weak. I can't understand why a debugger that shows the machine's bytecodes (which aren't even documented for the 3600 series!) is considered acceptable in a Lisp environment. Even C has symbolic debuggers these days! Their machine coexists pretty well with other types of systems on an internet. Their local filesystem is impressively slow. The documentation is pretty bad, but is getting better. It reminds me of the earlier days of Unix, where most of the important stuff wasn't written down. If you had an office next to a Unix guru, you probably thought Unix was great. If you just got a tape from Bell, then you probably thought Unix sucked. There appears to be a large amount of information about the Symbolics that is not written down and is common knowledge at places like MIT that successfully use the machines. (Perhaps Symbolics should ship a MIT graduate with their machines.) We have had a lot of difficulty setting up our machines. Symbolics has not been very helpful at all. /Jim