cg@ami-cg.UUCP (Chris Gray) (08/03/89)
Dana B Bourgeois (FelineGrace@cup.portal.com) asks why CBM doesn't just use
ARP in an upcoming release. I can think of a number of reasons, some of which
lots of people won't agree with (:-)):
The CBM software types have invested a fair amount of effort into understanding
and improving the existing commands. This experience would have to be
abandoned to move to ARP. They would then have to spend the time to
understand the code fully, so they could properly support it. (And, no,
I don't think they could contract the support to the ARP developers.)
Letting non-CBM people directly drive the software directions would be
virtually impossible, politically speaking. I also believe it would be
a very dangerous precedent.
Some non-Amiga-lovers complain that the Amiga's operating system is buggy.
I personally don't believe that (at least not much!). A lot of work has
gone into stomping bugs in the existing commands. Do we KNOW that the
ARP equivalents are equally debugged?
The ARP commands are not 100% compatible with the current AmigaDOS ones. My
understanding is that with some user-settable options, they can be very
close, however. What does this kind of incompatibility do to the Amiga's
image in the eye of the casual computer user? Or of any critic for that
matter ("The Amiga's software is so bad that they've thrown it out and
replaced it with some stuff that a bunch of hackers whipped up.")?
Now a contentious one!!!
I don't use ARP on my machine, and, unless it comes direct from CBM, I very
much doubt if I will. Why? I'm paranoid. I develop software on my Amiga as
my main Amiga activity. The software I develop is often complex and has bugs
and crashes the system. When something odd happens, I want to KNOW that it
is my fault, and not someone else's. I also don't use any background
resident programs, for the same reasons.
My final reason is that ARP is written in assembler. I've been programming
various computers in various languages (including several assemblers) for
about 15 years now, and I am a believer in the rule that says there is a bug
in every page of code. Hence, I believe that a program written in assembler
is likely to have more bugs than the same program written in a high-level
language. It may run faster and be smaller, but my system has a 68020 and
5 meg of RAM, so that doesn't matter much to me. (Actually I am quite
concerned with efficiency in programs, but not at the expense of reliability.)
A final reason is that I'm not sure its good to have source to system commands
readily available - people will tend to "improve" them. This could easily
lead to more confusion, and more criticisms of the Amiga having buggy software
and/or of CBM not being in control of the system they sell. This doesn't
happen to say, UNIX, because the average user can't recompile system commands,
slip then on a floppy, and give them to friends, upload them to BBS's etc.
Now I'll sit back and wait for some nasty flames...
--
Chris Gray usenet: {uunet,alberta}!myrias!ami-cg!cg CIS: 74007,1165