[Coco] Why DECB is important to OS-9 folk.

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 02:51 -0400, Robert Gault wrote:

> There does not seem to be much point in worrying about how to run Disk 
> Basic programs under OS-9 or attempts to make OS-9 work like Disk Basic 
> until there is proof that anyone actually is writing programs of any kind.
> 

Well, people are using OS-9. And there are plenty of DECB programs that
exist for coco many of which are, presumably, still useful. So I think
that means being able to run DECB programs under OS-9 would be useful.

As far as new programs, at least two ANSI C-Compilers are in the works.
The hope is that some subset of the wealth of ANSI C programs can be
more easily ported to coco.

Of course developers focusing on tools (meta-development) has always
been a problem with the coco, and hobby OSes in general. It comes from
programmers being their own marketing department. Programmer to self:
"What do users want?" to which the answer invariably is, well I'm a user
too, and I need better development tools and OS utilties. So obviously
the users want more and better tools!

But you look back at the great hot selling coco programs, and what do
you find? CocoMax and its successors, a few word processors, and various
games. The fact is that users don't care much about tools, by and large.
They (can you believe this) actually want to *do something* with their
computers.

The fact that out-of-the-box OS-9 is basically just a bunch of kernel
modules/drivers and utilities only perpetuated this kind of attitude.
OS-9 is hard to set up and use, so it encourages you to spend a lot of
time making it easier to set up and use by writing scripts and programs
to wear off the rough edges, as well as custom environments that have
just the tools you need for working on a given class of projects.

For newbies, with all the disk swapping and what not (say to launch
BASIC09) it makes it harder for them to be initially productive. With
DECB, you turn on the machine, and you're ready to run or develop
whatever application to actually make use of those computing resources.
If OS-9 just booted to a menu with a BASIC-09 environment, a text
editor/formatter, a terminal program and your most recent files, and an
option to start a shell prompt, that would be a big improvement. But
instead you get asked for the date, then given a shell prompt. That's
fantastic potential for us UNIX hackers, but for a RS-DOS user, they
might as well be adrift at sea with no compass. What's the next step?

The situation today is that for the most part the users have left, but
some of those that were once users grew up to be programmers. And
development tools today are phenomenally good. Of course we want to
backport that stuff to develop code for our favorite machine.

That and... just one more tool and we'll have our silver bullet, right?

Of course, we must always remember that any development done for the
coco is not just a means to an end, but an end in and of itself. It's
unlikely that anyone could sell more than, say, (WAG) 500 copies of a
piece of software for the coco. So to an extent we do things just
because it is interesting and fun, and whatever it is has yet to be
done.

-- John.