[Info-vax] Why so much Unix envy?

[Shark8]

On 9/3/2014 8:43 AM, bill at server3.cs.scranton.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> Hogwash.  Now we are blaming the tool again for the incompetence of the
> workman.

I think it's rather a circular relationship:
(a) The culture espouses a "Worse Is Better" philosophy, encouraging
(b) a "just get a compile" mentality, leading to
(c) turning off (or ignoring) warnings for large portions of the program
(d) which itself contributes to management being steered toward 
practices encouraging (a) and training "front-line" programmers that 
"Worse Is Better".

My point isn't that the programmers [and management] aren't blameless, 
they carry much blame -- but the tools themselves ought to be examined 
too, for they are /not/ blameless, as they almost encourage these behaviors.

One particular instance that most tooling shows its inferiority is in 
how it handles source-code: plain text. Given what we *know* about 
handling program semantics it's shameful that most source-code 
repositories are whitespace sensitive, recording non-semantic changes at 
the same level of import as semantic changes. (i.e. something trivial 
and unimportant, like some guy with a preference for spaces instead of 
tabs for indentation altering the source to his style is recorded at the 
same level as altering an algorithm to fix/introduce an edge-case.)

> Most Pascal compilers will let you turn off things like Range
> Checking and Bounds Checking.  Is that a flaw in the language?

IIRC, that's a compiler option and not addressed by the standard. 
(Though I don't think I ever read the *whole* language standard, so it 
might actually be in there.)