Re: [BLACKBOX] Blackbox mail list archive

From: [at]} <Lon>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 05:43:12 -0500

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On 2/16/12, Wojtek Skulski <skulski{([at]})nowhere.xy

SNIP... then:
> LabView drew me insane on Pentium as well. LabView poses an interesting
> question. If it is so bad as I experienced myself, then why is it so
> popular?

I suspect LabView is for hardware technicians, much like Ladder Logic,
And it suffers from the same kinds of problem. Both simulate electronics
and ignore the Power of Plain Text.

The VB project I did replaced 300-400 pages of Ladder with about 15 pages
of VB, and for that reason alone, VB pleased me.



Blackbox looks to be a steep learning curve, and the user interface is a little
out of date. But I did obscene, stupid, weird, horrible stuff to it
for two or three days
of evaluation and noticed several wonderful things, the first being:

    **** I couldn't break it. Oh sure, I got traps, but NO weirdness. ***

I can't tell you how many other systems I tred that went belly up,
even to the point of the Blue Screen Of Death, within 30 minuites of
kicking their tires.

Other nicities:
* It installs/deinstalls quickly and painlessly. A directory of
folders, a scribble in
the registry, nothing more. Multiple install/deinstall is a no-brainer.
* Its Oberon System OS roots show through, but unlike Oberon-2, it
maps to the typical Windows user much more nicely. When I realized
this, I archived the ETH Oberon I had downloaded previously.
* It is small enough that I suspect eventually I can wrap my mind around almost
all of it, particularly once I start pestering this list with Newbie Questions.
* The fast compilation is NOT hype (I'm running it on a laptop purchased in the
previous century and see no need to throw a faster machine at it).

The only thing I don't like so far is that somewhere along the way,
someone ripped out
the debugger, stating that the post mortem debugger is good enough.
That may be
true for an expert, but a beginner can learn a lot with
breakpoints-watches-stepping..

The "odc" format I've read that others whine about doesn't bother me at all. I
have a shadow directory tree with ASCII text duplicates of
distrubution source set up, and pointint a text editor at an ODC file
is not a kiss of death at all.

I've already plundered the Zinn collection, the Warford book,
OpenBugs, etc. It's nice to see that names I've come across many
times on the net are actually still using
this list.

Thanks for your responses, all. I appreciate them.

-Lon Williamson aka HalfTrack (don't ask!)

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Received on Sat Feb 18 2012 - 11:43:12 UTC