🚀 go-pugleaf

Dear Richard,

This is in reply to your sarcastic "So we should all stick to ADM-5
terminals and use ASCII, eh?" comment in reply to my hope that "open"
should not mean "open, that is, between 1130 and 1135 Wednesdays with
a total eclipse of the moon" in respect to the binary coded "open
systems interconnection" horrors in the field of what was once text.

Multi-media is a very interesting topic.  I don't think you should
trivialize issues of readability where all the multiple media are not
simultaneously representable in a convenient form.  Neither do I think
you should ignore the fact that some actual, real people, such as pro-
grammers, will have to sit down and write the software you will use on
your undoubtedly fancy 16-bit color 2048x2048 pel bitmap display device
with stereo speakers and a fountain with goldfish.  I do appreciate the
efforts that are made to formalize structures and concepts, as in ODA
and SGML, but I also think that when you need to write a device driver
for a window system just to read your mail in 12-point Times fonts
because that was what the sender deemed to be useful to you, it has
gotten somewhat out of hand.  It gets even worse when you have to spend
the better part of a year to understand the soi disant standards
involved, then shell out thousands of bucks to get a compiler for ASN.1,
and try to break that damn bitstream into something readable by a human,
eventually.  Add to this the frustration that comes packaged with the
next version of the standard, incompatible with the one you use.

Now you might intervene and say: "But _I'm_ not going to write those
programs!", implying that somebody else somewhere is going to do it for
of you, somehow.  I know that the relevant Working Group under ISO has
not given the idea of somebody actually implementing their stuff the
slightest consideration, at least not if they would do it for less than
the gross national product of Chile.  This, however, is not an excuse to
pick up their bad aim and faulty decisions.

After all, who cares what the underlying representation is, anyhow?
EXCEPT the system programmers, the application programmers, the
debuggers, the network folks, the toolkit designers, etc, etc, etc.
These folks are not slaves of your binary-coded whims, Richard.  They
will have to get paid, lots!, if they are to do a job which is good
enough to reach that Nirvana of Interconnectivity people are starting to
spin mythologies around.  Remember, one tiny little error in a binary
coded stream is going to wreak havoc, fast.  Some "it'll probably work
-- who cares" programmer somewhere is bound to make some lowly error
that will bring down your very important system at demo time.  It's
going to take ages to find the bug, unless you have bug-free "scopes" to
peek into the fluttering world of binary representation.

I don't write my programs in 12 pt Times Roman with a 630 Hz sub-carrier
and animated syntax rules, I write them in plain ASCII -- and for that
purpose, an ADM-5 will do.  I'd like the ADM-5 to be able to used for
testing, as well, and so would the sponsor of my project, unless of
course, he knows that some undefined set of taxpayers is going to pay.

"Have you hugged your programmer today?"
--
[Erik Naggum]		Gaustadalleen 21	+47-256-7822
<erik@naggum.uu.no>	N-0371 OSLO; NORWAY	+47-260-4427 (fax)