Autocoding project proposal.

[David Masterson]

>>>>> Timothy Rue writes:

> On 25-Jan-02 12:31:33 David Masterson <dmaster at synopsys.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Timothy Rue writes:

>>> On 23-Jan-02 19:26:05 Kragen Sitaker <kragen at pobox.com> wrote:

>>>> The Nine Commands given to us by the Prophet of the Three Seas are
>>>> as clear as the sun in the daytime, and as powerful as a tornado.

>>> They should be, considering they are based on the identification of
>>> the nine things you do, no matter what you do.

>>> http://www.mindspring.com/~timrue/vic-contents.html

>> Yikes -- Besides being a crop circle fanatic, he's a holdover from the
>> days of Commodore!

>> V.I.C. -- as in VIC-20
>> AREXX -- an Amiga shell language
>> Amiga-1000 -- an early model of the Amiga

>> I see nothing of substance in this.

> Now why would a "Software Engineer" go and distort such things?

> V.I.C. stands for Virtual Interaction Configuration.  I've never
> owned a VIC-20.

Okay.  After skimming your paper, I was almost sure that the idea for
the V.I.C. acronym was inspired by the VIC-20.

> Arexx is not an Amiga Shell Language but an Amiga Oriented version
> of IBMs REXX language. The orientation is one of making use of the
> Amigas IPC.

Yes, I kind of threw this one out too quickly without putting the
right interpretation behind it.

> Amiga-1000 was ahead of it time as a consumer product even admited
> to by Apple Employees.

I know, I owned one (as well as an Amiga-2000).  The point was not
that the Amiga was bad (it was very good machine), just that its been
(pretty much) dead and buried for a long time (but it is ashame).

Your papers, thus far, have not provided any clear and usable
description of what it is you're trying to do.  Even your
implementation of V.I.C. (as pointed out by someone else) doesn't give
people any idea what can be done with the tool.  I see a *LOT* of high
ideals and philosophical wish list in your papers, but no cogent
points that could be used to do real computing work.  The most
interesting thing I see on your web-page is the reference to IBM's
Autonomic Computing, but that's very similar to goals of CFEngine.
With respect to the goals of V.I.C. (near as I can figure), CFEngine
may be an implementation (with a goal of systems management), but
you'll see there is much more than 9 commands to it.

-- 
David Masterson                dmaster AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA