lane@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Christopher Lane) (11/10/90)
..one moment while I get this Kevlar suit zipped up... @begin(pyrotechnics) As much trouble as I'll get into, I wish to follow up on Eric Scott's 'All Shareware Is Crap' theme and state that, for the NeXT, 'Most Freeware Is Crap, Too'. For a delightful example, see Eric's 'mpnttotiff.c' code posted earlier. (Hours of fun if you sit down with it and any 'C' style/programming guide.) I don't necessarily agree with Eric's attack on iwscript and it's author (nor do I condone the unfounded arrogance of most of Eric's postings) but I believe there is a significant point brought out by his message. We as a community were given a 'clean slate' of a machine to start developing on with a better development environment than was generally available. In the nearly two years that followed, what have we done? Have we instigated a new era of high quality, modular, reusable code for all to share and benefit from? No, for the most part we took every existing 'C' program we could lay our hands on, ignored any existing quality problems, added ugly patches and slapped poorly written Objective-C code on top of poorly written C code with some poorly written PostScript wraps to boot. How many times have you seen the phrase 'I didn't have time to clean it up' when code gets posted to the net/archive. How many times have you seen C code and PostScript for the NeXT with hardcoded constants? (The screen size is my favorite--hasn't any one seen Macs with variant screen sizes?) Why aren't we making an effort instead of making excuses? Eric's 'stand on my shoulders and reach even farther' comment is right on the mark. Why aren't the archives loaded with well written, useful object classes (with source) that others can use to build even more powerful programs? Why is there a 'binaries' directory at all on the NeXT archive? If 'News' came with source, maybe others would have fixed the bugs, returned them to the author and we'd have a version that didn't blow up routinely. The archive maintainers shouldn't even accept 'binary only' donations (IMHO). Why are there two different 'GIF' viewers on the archive--why haven't they been collapsed into one by now? After using most NeXT applications, I usually end up hoping that a replacement surfaces that comes close to being of the quality of the typical utility on the Macintosh. With this great programming environment of ours we should be writing better applications than what's on the Macintosh, not worse! What went wrong? Or does having a more powerful programming environment really mean being able to churn out terrible software at twice the pace? Our community is about to double or triple in size, what guiding light into this new era of computing have we lit for these newcomers? And while I'm at it, why don't we as a community proof read and check our facts before posting? @end(pyrotechnics) "I love it when they shoot off a bunch of little fireworks at the very end!" "Me too son, me too" - Christopher PS: I Guess it's wishful thinking to hope I don't get Eric pissed at me too. -------