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Re: Oracle NT vs Oracle UNIX

From: jan <jan_at_tat.dk>
Date: 1998/09/24
Message-ID: <3609F3B3.EED12AF@tat.dk>#1/1

Chris Goellner wrote:

> One of the tricks is that UNIX systems are harder to design than NT
> systems because NT systems don't give you a lot of choices, UNIX
> systems give you too many. There are also more people out there that
> know NT. I can't really speak for the quality of either group of
> sysadmins since I only know a handfull of people in both groups.

I feel I have to contribute my opinion here - about the 'harder to design' UNIX. It is a common misunderstanding that it is more difficult to program in UNIX than in eg. Windows. As far as I can tell, this is based on the fact that there are many tools, that make it easy to make graphic front ends in Windows - apparently the front end is most of what inexperienced programmers think about when writing programs. Maybe this isn't surprising, because this is the part of the program where you can quickly see the results of what you're doing. In UNIX there's an abundance of similar tools, by the way, so actually Windows isn't really ahead here either.

But when it comes to the deeper layers of programs - like communication in a wider sense (like sockets, pipes etc), file handling, process control etc. UNIX is invariably simpler than Windows. This is, as far as I understand it, mainly due to the fact (?) that in Windows the concept of 'events' is much more fundamental to the system than in UNIX. In UNIX the equivalents of events are 1) the 'messages' in X, which are known from Windows too (well, where do you think MS got the idea ;-), and 2) the 'signals' which are a kind of 'system interrupts' (the kernel interrupts whatever the program is doing).

So in UNIX you don't 'register events' in order to avoid blocking your application's interface when you read from an asynchronous source, just mention one example.

In fact, most UNIX programs are about as simple as the corresponding DOS version of the same would be.

/jan Received on Thu Sep 24 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT

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