Re: WDSC vs SEU

From: Buck

It is for all but the simplest tasks.

It seems self-evident that WDSC is not a PDM-killer, because way more
people use PDM than WDSC.

<laughing>

They'd have said the same thing about cell phones in the early 90s. Or the
World Wide Web.

Listen to the complaints that every single newcomer to WDSC from PDM has
to say and tell THEM that their impression is all wet. The universal
opinion is that WDSC is too complicated and doesn't offer enough benefit
compared to PDM/SEU.

I don't have a single customer who says that anymore, Buck. Not one.

We veterans have spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince
newcomers of the truth in your reply and it's been a long, slow road.
It's my opinion that we (the WDSC community as a whole) have set
expectations too high -- unrealistically high.

Interesting. I teach people how to use WDSC and in one day they're
productive. I wonder what's different about my approach and yours, Buck.

Let's address your points. Superior search capability. True! Now take
a straw poll. I have 2 questions.
a) Who uses search from the SEU command line?
b) Who uses regular expressions in WDSC?

I'm talking about the PDM search capabilities, Buck. Man, sit back and put
down the caffeine <grin>. Seriously, the file search capabilities simply
blow PDM out of the water.

Integrated compile/errors far surpasses PDM. Listen the the newcomers
wonder how (and why) they need to set up the message filters and remove
the messages the error reporting sticks into their source. I happen to
like the WDSC system, and after a very short while I'm used to Ctrl-F5,
but how is it substantially different from F10, *err, F16?

Oh gz. If you can't learn Ctrl-F5 you need a new job.

Copying source between systems is easy with drag & drop but newcomers
count the time spent drilling down through the source tree as
frustration. SNDNETF is fast and can be scripted in a CL program so
that you can easily do incremental development and ship the source many
times via a CL program.

And if you have a filter set up for your source, it's a breeze. Use the
tool. SNDNETF is nice if you have it set up, but not all machines are set
up to support it between each other.

Everything in your reply, everything, is accomplished in PDM with
practically no more effort than needed in WDSC. We've raised their
expectations too high with comments like this.

You can't come close to the search capabilities (something you continue to
miss) and you can't copy between machines without configuring SNADS.

This is another expectation that is unrealistic. What does 'more
productive' really mean? Can PDM programmers now type faster because
they switched? I get bang for my buck (heh!) via regular expressions
and (the once and future) scripting, things SEU can't offer at all.
Copy/paste? Every emulator has it.

More productive means an easy way to see everywhere a field is used and jump
from one place to another. An easy way to expand am externally described
data structure or a file. Gz, Buck.

WDSC offers me more real estate than SEU, so I can easily copy a hundred
lines of code and paste them multiple times (heaven forbid) in multiple
open source members if I want to.

If this is the only benefit you can see from more real estate, then you are
missing the point.

I've already switched, for a decade now. My challenge to you is to
convince the newcomers that switching from PDM to WDSC is hard to
justify. Can you recall a post from a newcomer that went like this:
'Just tried WDSC. Loaded quickly and ran flawlessly. Does everything I
need and I'll never use PDM or SEU again!'? I can't.

Yes I do, Buck. Every time I teach my class, that's what 9 out of 10 people
say. They love it. They say they'll use SEYU occasionally for quick
things, but they love WDSC. There's always one curmudgeon who insists on
ignoring the benefits and complaining about how WRKMBRPDM starts faster, but
the people who actually want productivity, they love it.

There is a large
body of people who disagree with you, and continue to justify using SEU
every day. I believe it's because WDSC has been positioned as the
be-all and end-all of Life, The Universe and Everything. At least in
their minds.

WDSC continues to gain share, PDM to lose. That's the fact.

I'm going to try to 'market' WDSC to the folks here at work again, only
this time I'm going to try to set expectations a little lower. The
culture shock of moving to a GUI is apparently bad enough that the
adoption rate is just too low. I'll be positioning WDSC as a little
better than SEU, and for the obvious (i.e. anyone can see it when they
look!) screen real estate and coloured tokens (look -- no more stealth
comments!)

Why don't you pay someone to actually teach the product, Buck? Maybe it's
your positioning, not the product.

Joe