henry (07/12/82)
I really wish this discussion could be carried out by mail, especially when the questions are of the "have you quit beating your wife" variety that are aimed at rhetoric rather than information, but here goes. <begin flame> No, hard problems are not guaranteed to plague us forever. No, I am not implying that anything that's not easy is declared level-12 and shelved; that's a damn silly thing to say and you know it, Andy. I understand your unhappiness at having goofed in your macro usage and having wasted a printout, but I wish you'd waited to cool down before taking it out on me by shouting your frustration from the housetops. <end flame> "Re-implementing from scratch" does indeed mean going to a new macro package because this one is too hard to fix. I was dead serious when I classed macro-package work as difficulty 12 on a scale of 1 to 10; I know of no job that is anywhere near as difficult. The macro mess has indeed been with us for a long time, but it's only been in my hands for the last year or so. I've done work on it as time permitted; anybody who thinks time has permitted lots of work on it should see my to-do list. The time I've spent on it has mostly served to convince me that the effort involved is out of proportion to the gains, and it would be better to start over. I'm currently studying possible packages, and looking at the impact of the inevitable changes in user interface. Since I like to know what I'm letting people in for before I take the plunge, this takes time. Attention to the specifications of the Sanders will reveal that it is indeed a letter-quality printer, despite using a dot-matrix mechanism. (It's the only letter-quality dot-matrix printer available, which is part of the reason why we got it.) Please judge it by its output, not by preconceived notions about dot-matrix printers. Incidentally, anyone who thinks daisy-wheel printers don't have their own problems hasn't been responsible for supporting one. We also have an Olivetti electronic typewriter and a computer interface for it on order, but I hope we don't actually need it for production use. Defective hardware and software cannot be cured overnight, especially with the very limited resources of cash and manpower we have available. We charge money because we do provide service, which many people find satisfactory, or at least useable. Problems are inevitable when a small outfit like this tries to provide an ever-increasing range of services to an ever-growing user community. I would appreciate help and specific suggestions as to what should be done differently. Any volunteers for work fixing macro packages will be gratefully accepted.