From: utzoo!hcr!anton
Newsgroups: net.misc
Title: Hacking as a pastime or programming as a profession
Article-I.D.: hcr.128
Posted: Sat Jun 12 19:47:05 1982
Received: Sat Jun 12 19:53:21 1982

Drat ! eagle!jerry said it all, quite definitively.  In fact he sounds like
my old boss telling the new kids the difference between private and public
programmes.

If Charles and Andy want to argue dictionaries and puns, they are welcome
to.  I may even find it amusing not to tell readnews I am not interested - at
least until the pressure of work builds up.

Cotton shirts and all that ?  Well, I like English worstered wool suits and
english brogue shoes.  For walking in town they beat sneakers, and as any
tailor worth his salt will tell you, wool breaths.  But then I also like
donuts and not-the-nine-oclock-news.  De Gustibus....

I don't give a damn if Andy wants to call himself a Hacker;  I do object if
UNIX IV has piles of his stuff with the same kind of comment density as V7;
I do object to all the V7 drivers with wired in tables that I spend long
hours unwiring and generalising so our customers can - even as we do -
use the one controller and one driver for a number of different types
of disk (e.g. RM80, RM05 & RM02 all on the same controller).  I do object
to having our customers phone up wanting to use a spare line on a DZ-ll
to drive a diablo and having to edit and recompile the source so as to tell
them what binary patches to put into their kernel (Lets face it guys, I
plain disapprove of patching the kernel !).

I do object when our poor PASCAL guru locally spends about 4 times as long as 
he should have done trying to port the Whitesmith's PASCAL translator because
it was written following *none* of the design principles Kehrnigan expounded
in ST.

I don't give a damn if people want to go to hell on horseback.  I do object if
they insist on taking me along for a groom.


So why am I flaming in the UNIX context ?  Isn't UNIX the best thing we've
got ?   Sure it is. If you ever forget, go and use TSO for a few months.
That doesn't mean it  perfect though.  There are poor but very competent
programmers working for pitances here at UofT cleaning up remanants of V6;
and there are still idots coming in having done 6 months worth of BASIC
as PhD thumbtwiddling trying to tell those UNIX freaks how an opeating
system OUGHT to work.  There are the whizz kids growing up on apple
that are being let loose on avionic software - hey *I* worked with them,
they frightened me; when they asked me why I wasted my time writing 
documentation and "antibugging" I decided I needed a healthier working
environment.    

We have to keep screaming about the quality of the code or someone will
come up with another ADA.  If we were all of the mentality Charles, Andy
Jerry and myself are claiming, the basis that DOD had for forcing ADA on us
wouldn't be there in the first place.  Since it is, I am forced to conclude
that there are "hackers - people who program with bludgeons" out there.
We can make some prety shrewd guesses who they work for - mainly since "we"
have the self respect not to !

Lets see now, digital watches, CP/M, blue whales, speed merchants, bug-free
code....  There are people nieve enough to believe these are all real neat
things.


This started out being consise; I have tried to keep it from being a flame;

Parable:
	When hardware freaks get together at a conference for drinks, they
	talk about the latest chips from Intel, NS & TI.

	When software freaks ............................................
	talk about all the awful systems & programmes they have used and how
	to get around their ideosyncracies.

	The hardware guys are heralding new problems (when has a new chip 
	*NOT* brought new problems ?) whereas the software guys are trying
	to pool their experience.   Isn't that what UNIX is about ?

/anton aylward