[PLUG] Apology.

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 10:13:16PM -0500, Jonathan Sergent wrote:
> Everyone has preferences, but adjusting to unfamiliar environments is
> definitely an learned skill.  This is true of new operating systems,
> development environments, new programming languages, and definitely also
> new code bases and new projects.  Figuring out how to use the text editor
> and the compiler is usually pretty easy compared to comprehending the
> *mumble* kLOCs that have been dropped in front of you to do something
> useful with.  And I think it's a learned skill because I know I have
> gotten better at it over the last few years.

I've seen this firsthand. By far the biggest obstacle to me was the
multi-MLOC codebase I was thrust into on the job. As far as the coding
environment went, about the only familiar landmarks were /bin/sh, vi,
the C language, and make... and believe me, it feels like precious little
when that mountain of code is staring you in the face. I don't think it
would have made one bit of difference if I had been in some weird GUI
editor cum IDE or whatever with a whole new field (OS) and the gargantuan
codebase I knew nothing of going in.
... and now I'm moving into another codebase altogether.

On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 10:13:16PM -0500, Jonathan Sergent wrote:
> I think lack of devotion to any one platform (and willingness to work
> on many of them) is a good sign.  With enough experience, you begin to
> realize that all platforms suck, just in different ways.

If you think some of the modern environments suck, try their
predecessors.  There are plenty of places from which ancient flavors
of Windows can be resurrected (and ancient versions of Linux and *BSD,
too). Even more enlightening to me were my recent experiences
struggling with the text editors of RSTS/E V7.0 (TECO) and VM/ESA 2.4.0
(XEDIT). And I'm working on getting an account on a VMS box to see what
there is to learn from there. =) Get simh and see for yourself.

\end{obligatory-retrocomputing-plug}
Bill

P.S. Rest assured, there are several projects to simulate the PDP-10
going on, and eventually, we may even get to try out ITS. =)
-- 
"Ooooh. An ed script. Break out your mood rings and fondue pots,
	we're gonna have a tupperware party."
-- Branden Robinson, on the debian-devel mailing list