🚀 go-pugleaf

I am not a great amiga expert, but the mac has some definate advantages
for the programmer in certain areas:
  Text handling - when the mac was released, they gave me a one page
  pascal program that implemented a mouse based text editor with cut, 
  copy, and paste.  I sincerely doubt you could do as much on the amiga as
  concisely.

  Sound - recently net.micro.amiga had a note from R.J.Micah, one of the
  designers of the Amiga's software, giving three pages of C code to do
  what a mac programmer does as "SysBeep(1)"  Most amiga programmers use
  the equivalent of MacInTalk to make their machine say "Beep" because it
  is too hard to get a tone out of it.

  Debugging - for $25 you can get an Apple software supplement that
  includes the debugger MacsBug.  MacsBug remains in memory application
  after application, can dissasemble any code, can give a symbolic trace
  of the calling tree, knows the name of each operating system call, and,
  with its ES command, lets you exit back to the Mac's shell from a
  crashed application.  It is not even the best debugger for the Mac.
  Nothing even as good as it exists for the Amiga.  Most amiga programmers
  have to reboot their whole machine if even one task crashes.

  Resources - The Mac has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor called
  the resource editor that allows you to change menus, fonts, icons, and
  every detail of alerts and dialogs (requestors on the Amiga) without 
  ever recompiling.  An amiga programmer must laborously speel out these
  things in C code that does not look at all like the finished product.

  Fast dynamic linking, the Mac's control definition procedures, menu
  definition procedures, window definition procedures, and packages allow
  programmers to substantially change the behavior of compiled code
  without recompiling it.  I myself have taken Apple's finder, pasted a
  new window definition procedure into it using  the resource editor, and
  made all the windows apple shaped.  Apple replaced the standard file
  interface recently, and all the old programs suddenly became able to
  cope with a hierarchical directory structure,  something no other
  machine has done without requiring all the software developers to come
  out with new releases of their programs.   (Unix recently when through a
  change in its directory structure, and everybody had to recompile.) The
  standard amiga linker is so slow it is known as "Deep Thought"

  High level printing - Since mac applications comminucate with printers
  as if they accepted high level graphics calls, most applications did not
  need to be recompiled to accept laser printers, even though the
  applications had not been designed with laser printers in mind.  Amiga
  applications have to have special code for each kind of printer.


  safety - the amiga crashes if you draw a line that extends outside the
  screen.  (According to a friend who regularly crashes his amiga this
  way.)  The mac graphics system calls, although they aren't very safe,
  are safer than this!

  Disk Operating system interface - The mac's operating system takes a Pascal
  view of the world.  this is not great for a C programmer, but most Mac
  compilers have a pascal keyword that handles the details.  The system
  itself is pretty decent.  The Amiga's operating system is written in
  BCPL.  BCPL is a ancient British language that was directly responsible
  for the birth of C.  The designers of C started out in BCPL and
  concluded that it was not possible to make a BCPL compiler that
  generated decent code for a byte addressable machine. 

  programming environments - LightSpeed C, with its integrated
  compiling, linking, multi-window editor, make, grep, and profiling
  is so good and so fast, that I've known users of 8MegaByte, 16MegaHertz,
  Sun3 68020 systems to prefer to develop on the mac and port their code
  to the sun, because the 1MegaByte 8MegaHertz 68000 mac has a faster
  edit, compile test cycle.

Conclusion - both machines have their strengths and weaknesses as
programming machines.  I would probably choose an amiga if I were going to
write "Pong".  I would certainly choose the mac if I were doing anything
involving fonted text manipulation or object oriented graphics.  Although
the hardware of the Amiga should be faster than a Macintosh, the superior
software of the Mac consistantly makes it easier to use, faster, and more
powerful at the kinds of tasks that I like to do.
--- David Phillip Oster		-- "The goal of Computer Science is to
Arpa: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu  -- build something that will last at
Uucp: ucbvax!ucblapis!oster     -- least until we've finished building it."