From kragen@dnaco.net Fri Sep 4 15:58:54 1998 Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 15:58:52 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: Ben Trumble cc: rebecalist@bossanova.com Subject: Re: iMac Schmimac In-Reply-To: <35EFB300.281A@well.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1668 Status: O X-Status: On Fri, 4 Sep 1998, Ben Trumble wrote: > What's odd is that there's no real church of NT, nor was there a > church of WIN95? Maybe it's because they're just too successful? I think it's because nobody really likes them very much. You see the same phenomenon in languages. There are people who really like Perl, or FORTH, or C, or APL, or FORTRAN, or Java, or Eiffel, and who will tell you about it at great length, but you don't hear a lot of people who feel that way about Ada, or COBOL, or JCL, or BASIC. You don't even hear a lot of people who feel that way about C++. Those languages simply don't have the same appeal. I've never heard someone say, "You know, I used to program everything in BASIC, and now that I have to do it all in C, I really miss BASIC." Some things simply aren't very good, and so not many people like them. Anything that has just two or three major advantages over the alternatives will always gather a rather vocal following, for whom those advantages are more important than anything else. > I > confess that I still run WIN 3.1 on one of my laptops because it's > comfortable, like an old pair of jeans. I feel the same way about the > Mac OS, and I felt the same way about DOS. Even after a years and a > half I don't feel that way about the Linux I have running on my two > low-end Pentium boxes, but I think that's just because the command line > doesn't make sense to me the way that DOS did, though I think it's > wonderfully stable and versatile. It took me about two or three years to really get comfortable with Ultrix, but I've been pretty comfy with Unix ever since. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker I don't do .INI, .BAT, .DLL or .SYS files. I don't assign apps to files. I don't configure peripherals or networks before using them. I have a computer to do all that. I have a Macintosh, not a hobby. -- Fritz Anderson