🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm about to plunge in again and try doing some Amiga development.  I was
actually one of the original A1000 developers, but I got put off by the
apparently difficulty of the task --- not of the application I was thinking
of doing, but of the difficulty of doing battle with the operating system,
and so mostly gave up.  Over the years I've occasionally flirted with diving
in again, and here I am again...

The documentation gets better and better, and so mostly I think it is not too
hard any more to figure out HOW to write your application  [contrasted
with trying to puzzle out what was going on from the original RKM's... :-( I
really envied those early devleopers for being able to figure out how to get
ANYTHING done...].   BUT... the development environment still seems to be
impenetrable, and I'd appreciate some advice on how to cope with it.

It is hard to figure out quite how to ask this, but simply put the real
question is: how do you go about doing the development/debugging
cycle?  My memories of the old days is that EVERY programming error
resulted in either a crashed machine, or a hung-up one [or at the
least, a hung-up task and you could no longer figure out
what-happened-to-it].  Made for VERY painful, and S L O W, debugging.
Are there tricks and techniques for making things smoother?  As I
recall, the two biggest problems with dealing with a slightly-sick
program were: (1) whenever it died (or if you wanted to restart it), it
had always a bunch of allocated stuff that now had no good way to get
undone (e.g., windows and menus up, locks on directories, etc), and (2)
whenever it died or stopped, it would leave one or more queues of
un-replied-to messages in its wake.  In my at-work environment, I
generally do "three window" development: one window running an editor,
one running dbxtool, and a third with a shell for general poking
around, grepping, running make, etc.  Seems to work very nicely.  Of
course, the Amiga can do all of that... BUT... if virtually every
programming error requires a reboot to get the system flying again, the
point of having an editor waiting, or a CLI sitting there is pretty
moot.  Is there some special way to organize your programs, or special
tricks in the ways they're writter, or other little hints, that might
help me out?

Thanks!!

  /Bernie\

ps, just to make clear: I've worked in LOTS of different development
environments over the years, and written LOTS of code: I probably don't need
elementary-software-engineering advice [small modules, clean interfaces, etc,
etc].  Even *given* a meticulous 'personal ecology', Amy seems to make for a
prohibitively hostile development environment...  /b\