Off-topic: X Windows System experience

James Wilkinson james at westexe.demon.co.uk
Mon Apr 4 12:23:27 UTC 2005


akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> === X windows:
> You'd better sit down.
> Don't laugh.  It could be YOUR thesis project.
> Why do it right when you can do it wrong?
> Live the nightmare.
> Our bugs run faster.
> When it absolutely, positively HAS to crash overnight.
> There ARE no rules.
> You'll wish we were kidding.
> Everything you never wanted in a window system.  And more.
> Dissatisfaction guaranteed.
> There's got to be a better way.
> The next best thing to keypunching.
> Leave the thrashing to us.
> We wrote the book on core dumps.
> Even your dog won't like it.
> More than enough rope.
> Garbage at your fingertips.
>
>Incompatibility.  Shoddiness.  Uselessness.
> X windows.

Gene Heskett wrote:
> With all due respect, thats one persons opinion, and based on my 
> experience, the result of bad hardware.  Run it on hardware recovered 
> from the trashbin and it likely will run exactly as it was running 
> when it went into the trashbin, because it was running like that.

That's not being fair on the trashbin hardware. These days it's likely
to be a good ten years *newer* and *much* more powerful than what the
"one person" could use.

As far as I know, the quote dates back from the early days of X in the
eighties, when the hardware was barely up to doing a graphical
environment based on networking, and there were still lots of bugs to be
ironed out.

And there were lots of arguments about whether X was the right approach.
Many people preferred NeWS, Sun's proprietary environment (for example,
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/N/NeWS.html ). But the other Unix
manufacturers didn't like NeWS precisely because it was Sun's
proprietary environment.

(Incidentally, NeWS was written by James Gosling, who went on to write
Java.)

In hindsight, it's not that X was right. It's just that it was designed
to evolve.

And this whole thread is a testament to the need to edit your fortune
files (for length, if nothing else) if you're going to pipe them into
signatures.

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | ... where the teams bring a completely new definition
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | to the word 'entertainment', while retaining the full,
                      | original meaning of the words 'total' and 'rubbish'...
                      |     -- "I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue", BBC Radio 4




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