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From: tfb@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Tim Bradshaw)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
In-Reply-To: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk's message of Mon, 7 Nov 1994 18:57:44 GMT
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Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh
References: <BUFF.94Oct28135705@pravda.world> <CynKz5.13s@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
	<Pine.A32.3.91.941102150406.37864H-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org>
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Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 23:14:02 GMT
Lines: 39

* Jeff Dalton wrote:
> writes:
>> On Wed, 2 Nov 1994, Jeff Dalton wrote:
>> 
>>> .... Our Symbolics once sat idle
>>> for a couple of weeks becuase of an error it could recover
>>> from if you just pressed the "proceed" key!  None of our
>>> regular Symbolics users knew what to do about it!
>> 
>> It's very hard to believe that any "regular Symbolics user" wouldn't know 
>> what to do with a proceedable error.  Even a non-user could simply look 
>> at the options provided by the debugger and decide to press <Resume> or 
>> <Abort>.  Unlike the Eunuchs I've seen, the Symbolics keyboard tells you 
>> directly what keystroke corresponds to these actions.

> It wasn't a question of figuring out which key to press.  An error
> they'd never seen before occurred (while it was rebooting, if I 
> recall correctly) and they didn't know what they should do.  Was
> it ok to resume or not?

> My point is that the way a Symbolics seemed to an experienced,
> knowledgable user could be very different from how it appeared
> to someone who didn't know so much about the machines and
> their software.  Moreover, someone could still be in the latter
> category even though they used the machines a fair amount.

I don't really see that this is different than a Unix machine getting
some error it can't fix in fsck and dropping you into a single user
shell: even someone who used Unix machines a lot as a user might not
know what to do there.

I do have an awful memory of getting asked to help add a new hostname
(?)  to a symbolics machine's tables (the same machine you are talking
about I expect) and spending several hours fighting with it and its
manuals to no effect.  I think that it must be easier to do something
like that on Unix?

--tim

