What lessons from the amiga OS are applicable today?

[desiv]

For me, the whole "intuition" programming API was incredible...
Even someone like me was able to write Screened and Windowed based programs that interacted with the OS in a fairly uniform way...
And, once I realized what well structured programming was truly like, it made me realize that, as a programmer, I would be a great SysAdmin!
;-)  (OK, that's not quite how it happened, but basically.. ;-)

What I really loved was the "balance" that it provided...
There was the "ease of use" of the GUI and the power of the CLI.
The ST and the Mac both had GUIs.
DOS had power and configuration..  (I still prefer INI files to registry entries or (God Forbid) XML config files..)
But the Amiga proved that you could provide both and make almost every user happy.
You could get your Amiga and something like CLIMate or DirOpus and never touch the CLI. (WB 2 and 3, you probably didn't "need" the file managers either.)
Or you could live in the CLI.
Or you could hover around both...  (My personal favorite..)

And anywhere in between...
I think that's why I was much happier in the Windows world (even tho I had/have my issues) than the Mac world after the Amiga.  Yes, I honestly think the Mac GUI was a much better GUI (especially early on), but I just feel like I need the command line on a computer to be happy with it...

Amiga was the first desktop machine (not counting some of the Unix variants or other lesser known offshoots..  I did use GEM on a PC WAY back too  ;-) to get that "right" in my opinion..

And add in something like ARexx to make it easy for programs to interact with each other without having to write that interaction into your programs from the start...
(Meaning you didn't write your Word Processor to interact with your Spreadsheet.  You just made sure it was ARexx friendly so to speak and all programs, including yours, could benefit..)

It was just such an OPEN (in the interactive sense, not the sourcecode sense) feeling...

When I got back into the Amiga recently, I was just amazed how incredibly good WB 3.x really is, even compared to OSes nowadays..
Honestly, if my Amiga supported a current browser with Flash (I know, not going to happen with 68k, but this is "IF" world), I could use it today and still be happy...

Just how the OS works, it still does what I need an OS to do mostly the way I want.

OH YEAH!!  The RAM disk!!!  LOVE the RAM disk!!!  :-)

desiv

[desiv]

Urgh, I thoroughly hate INI files. XML config files should be the way

Yes, of course something like this:

 
    /path/to/*Test.php files
    /path/to/MyTest.php
 


Is much better than 1 line in a file that says:

testsuite=/path/to/Test.php

Not to mention the extra K's of code needed to parse that..
:griping: :griping:  :roflmao:

I prefer simple (it suits me.. ;-) and tighter code when possible.

I REALLY hate XML log files!!!! (Yes, I'm looking at you OpenFire!!)
I can no longer just "grep" for something, I need an XML parser!!!

(No, the above emotion is NOT an XML statement!!!)

desiv

And I totally agree about "assign"..  Man that's slick!!  Even better than "ln".  Not sure why no one has stolen that yet..