on 2/12/02 10:41 PM, Harry Zink at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> It's come up here several times before.... OS X (and, yes, I know you think >> it's the worst thing to happen to mankind ever > > Not quite that bad - eventually, once most of the NeXT mess gets excised, it > will actually become a useful, and productive operating system. I think, > more than anything else, OS X goes to show how little the NeXT team really > *ever* had to deliver during the long years of their tenure...
I must admit I have to agree with Harry here. It is quite clear that the NeXT team really is not up to speed on making a reliable, easy to use OS for the user. They seem to be Unix command line hackers more than anything else, given the blind and shortsighted insistence on things like file extensions, limited Unix file permission semantics, and na�ve Unix privilege models. I'm old enough to remember the amazing drop in software quality that accompanied the spread of Unix systems throughout universities and computer "science" and "engineering" programs. E.g., little things like never checking buffer sizes and returned status values.... My opinion: They had three tries to get the language right (and a simple PDP 11 assembly language no less!) and at C they still hadn't gotten it right. Unix was their corresponding OS, where reliability was a specific non-goal. -- Eric Hildum -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
