Aucbvax.5823
fa.info-vax
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax
Sun Jan 17 00:53:32 1982
Standards
>From FC01@USC-ECL Sat Jan 16 23:18:57 1982
I was wondering about peoples attitudes towards standards in systems
and programming languages. I somehow manage to often get caught in the midst
of an argument/discussion about some so called standard. As an example, I
am currently in a drawn out flaming session about (of all things) what user
name to give users on a Unix system. Now it all started when I asked people
what they wanted their user IDs to be. Is that a sin! I was met with three
opinions, my own being that people should get any userID they want, and if
they don't care to specify one initials are as good as anything else. Alas
the arguments came: 'You should force people to use their ARPA-NET name'
'You should default to the arpanet name' 'you should use last names' 'you
should allow choice and default to <ARPANET/LAST> name', ... etc. I guess
good healthy dissagreement is a good thing, and people should be aware of all
the options available to them, but I just can't see people getting all in a
a huff about things that are features. I am pleased with any feature I find,
but I don't live or die by them. I don't call people fools or turkeys just
because they don't have my favorite version of my favorite feature in their
version of my favorite <LANGUAGE/EDITOR/COMMAND INTERPRETER/...>. I don't
think that all fortran (and yes even Cobol) programmers are in the last
century. I do however think that every system should have a good macro
processor that allows the user to flexibly determine the user interface
desired for any given type of usage, and allows a reasonable degree of system
feature/drawback independance. I guess I am crazy, but I find that fortran 4
is transportable almost anywhere with little trouble if you keep to the
standard, and I try to just so I can remain free of system quirks. I also use
more or less standard lisp 1.5 or so features to avoid the pain of changing
lisps. I also use the individual debugging features, etc, but try to keep my
code pure. So the next time you feel like flaming about such things, be glad
you have what you can get, try to make life better for yourself by asking if
better things exist, but don't insult your own intelligence by using abusive
phrases like I sometimes do.
Fred
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