Posts by Citizen_Jimserac

MacOS9.app: A tour de force of emulation and integration

Excellent Article and. A Note on a Great DOS App Released too Public Domain but Little Known

Thanks for quite an interesting article.

did not know there were any emulators for older Mac stuff which I come across now and then.

Since you said you like Old DOS apps, here's one which I still use through Wine on a Mac.

If I recall correctly, it's from a now defunct company called "Network Solutions" or something like that.

The program is called just "DELTA" and it. is the best directory comparison tool I've ever used, totally intuitive user interface, using the TAB key to go from one to several comparison windows where it arranges the files spaially, leaving blank lines for a missing file or directory and showing the file or directory in red when they do not match exactly.

To,for example copy a file from one directory to the other where it is missing, simply move the cursor over the file, be in the active window and hit the "C" key for copoy.

The program originally sold for about $100 and was updated to handle longer filenames around 2000 but was released to the public domain about a year later which you'll see if you can find their old web site. Probably best just to search for the terms "DELTA" and "directory comparison" "tool" or something like that.

Thanks Again !

JP. (Software engineer for 32 years,Job Outsourced to India in 2004 effectively ending my career).

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

I programmed in "C" for nearly 10 years, from 1984 til the mid 1990's.

As is the case with human languages, of course their our ambivalences, differing assumptions and all the rest that goes with such anendeavor.

I retired from software development in 2004. I've been waiting, expecting better languages to be invented to dramatically improve the accuracy and productivity of software engineers.

It hasn't come. Rust and Swift suffer from similar problems. They inherit too much from C while focusing on remedying deficiencies instead of developing new algorithms and paradigms to make programming more like English with all the mechanisms necessary to interpret and question ambiguities.

We do not think in for loops and procedure and if then else's.

Sooner or later someone will come along and take a radical new approach and then software development will leap forward.

Until them, people will remain stuck in the quagmire of enforced straightjacketed logic, structural protocols and byte minutae.

Old Dykstra was part of the problem, attempting to enforce a totally logical stepwise refinement in a world where things interact chaotically and grow by unexpected mutations. His "Discipline of Programming" is a thing of beauty. He wouldn't have lasted a month as a programmer.