X11 bashing

[Barry Margolin]

In article <1991Apr16.210107.41817 at eagle.wesleyan.edu> amolitor at eagle.wesleyan.edu writes:
>Software development cycles should not proceed as: add every concievable
>feature, then tune. Something more like: get something minimally useful,
>tune, then see if something more is needed. If not, STOP. If more
>features are needed, add them, and re-tune.

I never used anything earlier than X10 myself, but I assume the first few
versions of X were minimally useful, and eventually they decided all the
features of X11 were needed.  The X developers were not just adding
features for their own sake; they were trying to solve real problems.

>> Most of the critics have failed to suggest what they would have liked to
>> see as a windowing interface instead of X.
>
>	Very well. I want xterms. Nothing more. I want to be able to pop
>open 80x24 windows that emulate vt100s correctly.

So get yourself a Macintosh and run NCSA Telnet.

I don't think users would like to waste the power of bit-mapped
workstations for such simple use, though.  X was developed as a way to
implement portably the kinds of applications that were already being run on
Macintoshes, Suns, Lisp Machines, Xerox workstations, etc.  The networking
part was presumably a response to the problem that applications often need
to run on computers that are a long way from the user (e.g. on a machine at
some remote supercomputer center).

>	I rather suspect that this windowing system could be written to be
>terrifyingly fast, and to consume negligable resources. I further suspect
>that it would provide a high percentage of the *useful* functionality of X.

I don't think our image processing and animation people would consider
a bunch of 24x80 terminal emulators to be a "high percentage of the useful
functionality of X."
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
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