Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Linux and winning

Author:Eric Soroos
Posted:3/6/1999; 9:26:55 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 3/5/99
Msg #:3749 (In response to 3698)
Prev/Next:3748 / 3750

Boy. You go away to a 24 hour dinner party and a discussion occurs. I appreciate the relatively even handed discussion on the issue of Linux and Frontier. I certainly see more of your side than I did before all of this happened.

I'd like to bring in a bit of background. I'm not a prototypical frontier developer. I am a hobbyist who put together a cool hack and it has grown to have a life of it's own. I like programming in usertalk and other high level scripting languages far more than I do low level code like C. In fact, it's been a long while since I did anything in C more complicated than make clean; make install.

Frontier isn't currently driving my choice of systems. For my personal development, it is sufficient to have it on personal OSs. (Mac/NT) What is driving my choice of OS is applications for my day job (I design bridges), and they are mainly structural engineering programs that only run in Windows. Unfortunately, when I need to reduce a lot of data quickly and do results visualization, the tools are far more availiable for linux. I can do the work in NT, but it's not as productive as it would otherwise be.

My ideal os would probably be along the lines of MacOS X server. A solid well thought out gui and the core of a unix box. Unfortunately, the two systems that have these particular specs are either too expensive for a desktop (OSXServer ($1k)) or don't run the software I need (Beos and OSXServer). Then again, it's been over 10 years since WIMP made its debut. It's high time for the anti-mac.

eric

ps. WIMP is windows i-something mouse pointer




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