🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <WEISS.91Mar19151349@toucan.lcs.mit.edu> weiss@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Paul G. Weiss) writes:
>Let me try to respond to the flurry of recent posts that have resulted
>from my follow-up to Todd's original post.
>
>I was struck by the unfairness of Todd's post, given past
>dealings.  Todd lives in Hawaii, we are in Boston.  His reasonably toned
>letter (his words - and having read the letter I would not disagree)
>is dated March 4 and his less reasonably toned post is dated March 5,
>hardly enough time for us to receive the letter, let alone respond.
>I mention this because I understood Todd's reference to his letter to
>mean that we had been given the opportunity to respond and had not.  My
>first thought was that the letter was sitting on the addressee's desk,
>as she had been out sick for some days.  It was only when the letter
>arrived a few days later that I knew what was going on.

I apologize if the impression I gave was that Arity had an appropriate
amount of time to respond to my written letter. Let me rephrase the
situation. I sent my upgrade request and check sometime in December (late
December as I recall). When no upgrade arrived by late february I called
Arity to ask what was going on. I was told that bugs had been discovered
during beta testing and that the release of 6.0 would be delayed. "Fair
enough," I thought. And besides, Arity had not charged against my credit
card so it was not like I was losing money in any way by waiting. When I
received the upgrade in March I was surprised to see such a thin package
(e.g., I knew right away there was no documentation in the package) and,
upon opening the package, just finding disks, a cover letter, and a few
brochures in there. I assumed that Arity would ship manuals later since
they had shipped upgrade disks ahead of the documentation to me in the
past. I then printed out a large amount of README type files and started
studying the numerous changes that needed to be applied to the Arity 5.0
manuals. A day or so later I learned from a friend and fellow Arity user
that he had spoken to someone at Arity and was told that Arity would not
ship new manuals to accompany the upgrade. Please note that no where in
Arity's cover letter was there an indication that no new documentation
would accompany this release. The letter did say to read the various README
files. But then, don't all upgrade cover letters? After seeing what I had
gotten as an upgrade and some other considerations which I address below, I
decided to ask Arity Prolog users on the net to write to Arity to voice any
concerns they had about this upgrade.

>Todd, if you had given us the courtesy of coming to us first, as Richard
>O'Keefe assumed you had, you would then have much better information to
>include in your posts.	Richard writes:
>
>> Note that the poster who started this thread *had* gone to the vendor
>> first.  Going to the net afterwards was a perfectly sensible thing to do.
>
>Given the timing of the post, you did *not* come to us first, even though
>your post implies that you have.  That is what is so unfair about it.

Ok.. Fine.. It is now March 20th as I write this... Although I did receive
a message on my home answering machine, I have not received any other
communication from Arity (aside from Paul's postings) about either my paper
letter mailed around March 4 or my net posting. I would be as receptive to
an e-mail response to either my paper letter or net posting. However, I
have not received any answers to any of my questions either in the form as
a net-posting (which Paul does not what to do and whose wishes I respect)
or a paper letter.

>Todd raises a variety of issues in his three posts and in his letter.  His
>letter has been answered and I will not respond to it here.  As for the

In her phone message to me, Meredith indicated she had written a letter
responding to my questions. However, again, as of March 20th, I have not
received that letter. No matter how we berate our Postal Service at times,
I know for sure that in most cases letters from the east coast to Hawaii
takes no more than 5 or 6 days when sent first class.

>content of his posts there is much that Todd says that is accurate and
>much that is not.  I will agree that Arity's documentation leaves a lot
>to be desired and does contain some inaccuracies.  I should note that
>the most recent review (AI Expert - Jan '91) described our documentation
>as "two well-written manuals," even though it points out the problem with

I read the Jan 91 issue of AI Expert which briefly reviewed Arity Prolog
5.1 and a number of other MS-DOS and Mac based Prologs. The review was
very favorable in its assessment of Arity 5.1. I think it was a relatively
fair review except for its note about Arity's documentation. I don't know
what documentation the author of that review had, but the last
documentation Arity sent me is dated 1988 and has numerous errors on nearly
every page. As I mentioned before, Arity has not sent me something like 30
printed pages of documentation changes (due to software changes and
documentation errors) in their 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0 upgrades. The "pure"
Prolog part is pretty accurate, of course. But that doesn't matter
since one can go to numerous sources to get clarification on Prolog
programming. The real documentation problem lies in the extensions that
Arity added to their Prolog. Many of these extensions are quite
valuable in producing the kind of software many of us want to put out
(menuing, dialog boxes, etc.).  However, my manual is so full of red
ink after making doc changes for 5.0 and 5.1 that there is no way I am
going to take the time to apply 19 pages of corrections to dozens and
dozens of pages of two manuals.

>one.  To reprint the manuals for this release would have both delayed the
>release and raised the cost considerably, and Todd already feels that the

Ok... You may think that I've been unkind (I don't). But here, I draw
the line. Hey, Arity released the last maintenance upgrade (5.1)
sometime in 1989 I think. This was just a bunch of fixes to patch up a
buggy version 5.0 released in 1988. So, we users have been waiting over
three years now for an upgrade. Believe me, we could have waited a few
months more to get decent documentation.

>price is too high (I will address pricing issues below).  In fact, the
>next "release" of the manuals will most-likely be on-line documentation,
>a format that is a lot more easily updated than printed documentation
>(not to mention cheaper).

No disagreement here... It is cheaper and easier to update. I'm a firm
believer of online documentation. I'm a firm believer in applying Hypertext
techniques to documentation. BUT! Only as augmentation to hardcopy
documentation. Call me old fashioned, but I still like to have a manual
that I can stick little yellow post-it notes in and write in the margins.

>Todd's other major point has to do with whether or not version 6.0 is
>a "major upgrade."  Todd equates this to whether or not the product has
>a "modern programming environment (when compared to Borland C++, Quick C,
>Actor, etc.)."  Indeed, Arity's programming environment is not as full
>featured as those mentioned, and we have never claimed otherwise.  We do
>provide a windowed editor, debugger, etc. and our environment is quite
>usable, but not as powerful as those mentioned.

Ok.. So, what is a major upgrade? Arity 6.0 does not seem to have any
significant differences from 5.1. It has a few new extension predicates and
fixed a few flaws. And, it no longer makes me press "OK" after I execute
'halt.' to get back to DOS. But I don't see anything that warrants a
version number change from 5.1 to 6.0. At best, it is a maintenance fix and
should have been advertised as such by using a version number like 5.2.

>However Arity's focus in the Prolog market has never been on slick
>development environments.  We have always been targetted at the
>professional, production programmer.  Even though our products are

Sorry, again... I cry "foul"... Is the implication that "professional"
programmers all use clumsy primitive tools to do development? The
integration of a good development environment with a functioning and
optimized interpreter or compiler is the key to professional software
development.

>The comparison with Borland is highly misleading.  Especially since their
>pricing structure did not allow them to stay in the Prolog tools business

Yes, but Turbo Prolog survives as PDC Prolog. I'm not saying that PDC
Prolog is better than Arity. If I did, I would have switched to it long ago
since it does provide a lot of the environmental features I want to see it
Arity. However, the reason I did not switch to either Turbo or PDC Prolog
is that I didn't consider it to be a "real" Prolog with its Pascal-like
strong typing and other oddities.

>for very long.	Let's face it folks, good, bad, or indifferent, there are
>a lot more C and C++ programmers out there than Prolog programmers.  This
>means that the average Prolog programmer must pay a larger proportion of
>the development costs of good development tools if such tools are to remain
>available.  It does neither Arity nor its users any good to price ourselves
>so low that we can't afford to remain in the business.

Again.. "foul".... I just received an upgrade to my Sage Professional
Editor (from version 1.0 to 1.1). Sage has about 145 employees from what
I've read in a recent article about them. So, they are bigger than Arity
but not what one would call huge in the software industry. This maintenance
release was actually pretty substantial. Sage supplies full source code for
their library functions, so I was able to look in detail at the changes
they've made. Sage made a lot of signficant changes in this release.
They've fixed a few bugs, added a bunch of interesting features, and sped
up the editor (it was plenty fast in version 1.0). They also provided me
with a complete set of new manuals (117, 133, and 422 pages of manuals).
The Sage Editor upgrade, by the way, includes versions for both DOS and
OS/2. Yes, the new manuals are missing a few last minute changes and
additions that are in a README file. But that README file is nowhere near
19 pages long. And lest you say, "but it's just an editor..." Let me add
that the Sage Professional Editor includes a compiler that allows you to
change the library functions (remember Sage supplies full source code) or
add your own functions. This editor language is a superset of AWK with many
C features. I've used it for a few months now and I would say that it is as
complex and full featured as many packages sold as software development
languages. Oh, by the way.. What did I pay for this upgrade? *NOTHING* !!!
It was a free upgrade....

Now, I have said several times now that I have had a lot of respect for
Paul and for Arity Corp. But having tried to ensure that my respect for
Paul and Arity was recognized by people reading my posting and having Paul
repeatedly attack me, I think the key word here is "had". I think that Paul
is making a lot of excuses and neither he nor anyone else at Arity has
responded to my questions posted here and in my letter to them.

While I would agree that the "Prolog aspects" of Arity Prolog meet all the
requirements needed to write "Prolog" programs, the package itself falls
far short of what "professional" programmers expect to be provided in a
professional development system. And since Paul seems to like taking cheap
shots at my programmer status.. Let me say that I posted from this
University account since I use Arity Prolog in the development of software
for my dissertation here. However, I spend most of my time as a
non-university Systems Analyst. So, when I tell you Arity Prolog doesn't
come near what I expect on my DOS and UNIX based development systems at
work, I am not blowing hot air. It falls far short of what I have in my
non-dissertation related work environment. So, bottom lines are:
(1) Arity implied major changes in their product in their upgrade letter
and in changing their version number from 5.1 to 6.0. It isn't a major
upgrade. It is a maintenance release.
(2) Professional software developers DO expect a modern development
environment and find it an important aspect in their productivity.
(3) Arity has not answer any questions posed to them by me as of March 20.

Sorry to waste so much net-bandwidth here, folks. But I think Paul's
defensiveness is simply an indication that the product itself does not have
the substance to defend itself and I want to make sure that is communicated
to potential customers since it appears Arity is not going to provide such
essentials as updated documentation.

Paul, if you want to flame me... Fine... But if that is all you are going
to do (given that I have not received any answers yet) all you are going to
prove is that Arity is unable to upgrade their products the way other small
(Sage) and large (Borland) firms do and I think all of us who have used
Arity Prolog for a long time now have to wonder what we can expect from
Arity Corp. in the future or even if you will be there for us in the
future. And, don't tell me that Arity or any other company will be around
forever. Anyone seen a new release of Visicalc lately?
--
Todd Ogasawara, U. of Hawaii
UUCP:		{uunet,ucbvax,dcdwest}!ucsd!nosc!uhunix!todd
BITNET:		todd@uhunix
INTERNET:	todd@uhunix.UHCC.HAWAII.EDU