Why use U* over VMS

[Steve Hamm]

-----On 23 Oct 90 14:14:16 GMT, andyo at glasperl.masscomp (Andy Oram) said:

Andy> It's been almost a week since Siegfried Heintze made his bold
Andy> request.  I'm gratified to see no one has flamed him, but really
Andy> no one has made a strong answer either.  The utilities and shell
Andy> tricks and so forth are nice, but what about the design choices
Andy> that make UNIX popular for systems and applications programming?

Andy> This group is comp.unix.programmer, after all.  Isn't there
Andy> someone out there who can summarize the differences in working
Andy> with the guts of VMX and UNIX, someone who can speak from the
Andy> experience of porting highly interactive applications or writing
Andy> device drivers or something like that?  There must be some good
Andy> general learning experiences here.

I would speculate that there aren't that many people who have seriously
used both VMS and UNIX.  I have, at least somewhat seriously, although
I don't consider myself expert on either one.  I've used most of the
system service calls under VMS, and done some strange terminal I/O 
stuff under BSD.  More explicitly, I used VMS from versions 1.x to 4.x,
from 1979 to 1986, and UNIX from 1986 to present.  I bought VAXset,
which was referred to earlier, when it first came out, and watched
it develop.

I develop simulation software, and do not do device drivers or kernel
hacking.  My views would undoubtedly be different if I did device
drivers or internals.

Frankly, other than the portability argument, I don't think that
there's a lot of reason to switch from VMS to UNIX.  (Other than
getting out from under DEC's very expensive domain.)  VAXset compares
very favorably with the standard make/SCCS setup.  VERY favorably: CMS
has features in it that make it look OK compared to SCCS/RCS.  MMS
(comparable to make) is miserable and cryptic, but so is make.  The
code/variable navigation capability of (PCS? forget the name) isn't
available under UNIX unless you buy some third party stuff.  The VMS C
compiler was nearly ANSI three or four years ago -- most other vendors
haven't got their ANSI compilers out yet.  And, as a command language
environment, UNIX has a lot to hate: every command is its own little
world, with its own syntax and, frequently, the same switch does
something entirely different.  VMS has commands that behave according
to the same rules, with consistent syntax.  There are some things that
I used to do under VMS with a one line, relatively short command, that
take a shell script with a find command to do under UNIX.  Of course,
you can do anything with a complex enough find command ;-)

VMS, of course, has lots to get irritated about also, but I think a
person in the know can match point-for-point with similarly irritating
UNIX characteristics.  I can get my job done, reasonably well, in
either UNIX or VMS.

Now I am using UNIX and wouldn't go back to VMS (well, if someone
offered me LOTS of $$, perhaps).  Why?  DEC lost the workstation war
(or at least the first round of battles), and my program runs on
workstations.  If I port to a DEC machine, it will have to be one
running ULTRIX: VMS is an expensive, proprietary environment, and that
means lots of work, time, and effort in porting for a limited
audience.


--
Steve Hamm -------  Motorola Inc. Semiconductor Systems Design Technology
                    3501 Ed Bluestein Blvd., MD-M2, Austin TX 78762
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