31 Oct
1998
31 Oct
'98
10:21 a.m.
Hi.
It must be the (near) full moon... the day... or.... *howlllll* *grrr* ;)
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Strickland <jim(a)calico.litterbox.com>
The biggest problem these older machines had was
microsoft operating
systems.
(okay, I'm a Unix/VMS bigot at heart, but DOS and
win3.0/3.1 really WERE
that
bad.)
I guess that before telling you how full of shit ( in a friendly way, of
course ) you are I should ask what your refering to here...
>...but I've never met anyone who really LIKED
these operating systems the
way the apple-heads liked prodos and gsos.
*statement now invalid*
Alas, (new) Apple-heads are turned-on by marketing ala translucent/green
repackaging. Dont get me wrong. the Woz is a god and Newton OS rocks, IIx
was cool...
The only thing that makes me seek non-ms oses is the programming ease
facilitated by microsoft in app development. Need some challenges
somewhere.... but I guess this is true for any programmer and their
preferred platform...
Mike: dogas(a)leading.net
.
31 Oct
31 Oct
10:45 a.m.
From: Jim Strickland <jim(a)calico.litterbox.com>
*snip*
The biggest problem these older machines had was
microsoft operating
systems. I guess that before telling you how full of shit ( in
a friendly way, of
course ) you are I should ask what your refering to here...
1 Nov
1 Nov
5:55 p.m.
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12:53 a.m.
Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
I'm a programmer who's currently stuck in a
sysadmin/netadmin role and for
the past two months I've done nothing but put out fires nearly every day
(and this is a network of Linux boxes---if you treat Linux as Unix, then it
may be slightly on topic 8-) what with problems with INND (almost 10 years
old) and Sendmail (15 years old and still a security nightmare [3]) and
poorly written, non-documented cryptic and convoluted shell scripts in Perl
[4]
[4] Which takes the worst aspects of Basic, C,
shell, awk, grep and
C++ with none of the good aspects. Blech. [5]
[5] IMNSHO 8-)
Oh, Perl is a good language, I have enormous respect for Larry Wall.
Remember that there has never been a language written in which it is
impossible to write bad programs. Admittedly I don't use it as much
as I should (it's too new), as a sysadmin type my main language is
still the Bourne shell and its descendants after all these years.
And even when I write scripts for ksh and bash, I try to stick to
the subset compatible with the original, since that way they'll run
on my Tandy 6000 and AT&T 7300s. (Oh, I do document even my simplest
scripts, since there are several that have been evolving for a decade
and a half, since my days as a Tandy tech support guy).
And I challenge you to find any "non-worst" aspects of awk. After
almost 16 years, I still can't use it without having the man page
immediately at hand.
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram@cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
WARNING: The Attorney General has determined that Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms can be hazardous to your health -- and get away with it.
1:56 a.m.
New subject: Very OT, not Classic at all: Comments on Perl (was Re: Ancient , machines turning on)
On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
Amen...
Aaron C. Finney Systems Administrator WFI Incorporated
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"UNIX is an exponential algorithm with a seductively small constant."
--> Scott Draves
Oh, Perl is a good language, I have enormous respect
for Larry Wall.
Remember that there has never been a language written in which it is
impossible to write bad programs. Admittedly I don't use it as much
as I should (it's too new), as a sysadmin type my main language is
still the Bourne shell and its descendants after all these years.
And even when I write scripts for ksh and bash, I try to stick to
the subset compatible with the original, since that way they'll run
on my Tandy 6000 and AT&T 7300s. (Oh, I do document even my simplest
scripts, since there are several that have been evolving for a decade
and a half, since my days as a Tandy tech support guy).
I'm in the same situation as Cappy, a programmer playing a sysadmin on TV.
But for me, our NT machines (after the 10th format) are stable (our fax
server has been running well for ~3 months without a reboot, even with
SP3!) and the Linux and FreeBSD boxen are even more so.
Perl has been a godsend for me, since it allows me to write fairly
intricate system-related programs with good portablilty between the Unix
and NT machines. In fact, I have one larger program (~ 7,500 lines) which
performs some automated ftp uploading of client's files that has been
running without a hitch for more than 6 months! I think I've made less
than a dozen mods during that time, while the system was still on-line,
and just killed and restarted without missing a beat. I used to do any
CGI-web stuff in C. Halfway through a project to allow clients to have
access to status information in a MSSQL database on an NT server (web
server is Linux/Apache) I tried Perl; I finished 3 weeks *ahead* of
schedule! When was the last time that happened??? And using the Sypberl
module, I was able to connect to the MSSQL server on the first try. Damn!
And you want to rag on Perl?
And I
challenge you to find any "non-worst" aspects of awk. After
almost 16
years, I still can't use it without having the man page
immediately at hand. 
7:16 a.m.
Ward Donald Griffiths III <gram(a)cnct.com> wrote:
And I challenge you to find any "non-worst"
aspects of awk. After
almost 16 years, I still can't use it without having the man page
immediately at hand.
I like awk. It's a simple language that is good at solving certain
classes of problems (and terrible at others). But I'd rather have a bunch
of small tools that each solve some problems well than one huge
kitchen-sink tool that solves all problems badly. That was, after all,
the original Unix philosophy (see _Software Tools_ and _The Unix Programming
Environment_).
To each their own...
9548
days inactive
9549
days old
5 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
aaron＠wfi-inc.com -
dogas＠leading.net -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
gram＠cnct.com -
jim＠calico.litterbox.com -
spc＠armigeron.com