John McKown wrote: >I somewhat agree (as difficult as that is for me). In today's world, it is >expected that a worker will just walk in off the street and have the >"intuitive" knowledge of how to use computers. As much as I dislike it >personally, z/OS really needs the "new look" interface to present to the end >users, and even programmers. I wonder if anybody has done a study of >productivity between "old style" development using ISPF and edit-compile-test >versus using the RD/z Eclipse based software.
Of course they have...many times. And they all show that IDEs are more productive, FVSO "more productive": programs get done faster. Not necessarily better, but faster. And it's a positive feedback loop: once the IDE is all anyone has used, old-school programming becomes unthinkable. And that's how we get the instability that is Windows. Not even necessarily the Microsoft end of it: a near-infinite number of vendors with an infinite number of monkeys banging away at their IDEs, producing products that sort of work, but perhaps destabilize the underlying OS (or Office, or some other product) may be the real cause. Of course this is an oversimplification, but when you make programming so simple, even a kid can do it, you get programs written by kids. Even open source, for all its benefits, isn't a real solution: look at the plugin-container hack Firefox has resorted to. Is that strictly because Flash is so unstable? Chrome doesn't seem to have any significant Flash problems (or maybe I just use Firefox more). I'm on the Beta channel of Firefox right now because the production version was hanging my Windows 7 machines (maybe that's been fixed by now, but it *was* true). Worse, I had no real way to debug it. OK, so I sound like a cranky old fart. If the shoe fits... -- ...phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
