🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jan18.070335.26058@alphalpha.com> nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:
>Actually, on a slightly different tack.  Cygnus has recently posted
>a commercial advertisement (although noone seems to have complained :-)
>to a number of groups.

Ok, I'll complain.  Please stop the commercial advertisements.

On another note, how do the various people making claims "know" how a
world with "freed" software will turn out?  Why this belief that of
course things will always turn out for the best?  People seem to wear
some mighty rosy glasses when evaluating the current crop of GNU
products:

   There are, in fact, commercial compilers with fewer bugs that
   generally produce better code.  

   Gnuemacs is definitely big and slow.  Unipress emacs (last time I
   checked, which was years ago) had a scummy but serviceable extension
   language, and was a hell of a lot faster and leaner.

   For non-programmers, there's also the question of whether an
   extension language represents very much added value.  My favorite
   non-programmer had nothing good to say about emacs, and vastly
   prefers MacWrite, which does has no extension language and solves
   the problems that she has.

   Bison looks good compared to ancient technology, but if I needed a
   tool like that I'd use Linguist, a non-free, for-profit, attribute
   grammar evaluator generator.

As someone else has already posted, most "secretaries" use PC or
Macintosh word processors.  It cannot be that hard to write a "freed"
word processor -- a friend who wrote a WP for the Mac tells me that
it's under 40kloc, or well less than half the size of gnuemacs -- yet
it has not happened.  Why has such an "easy" thing not appeared?

David Chase
Sun