Re: Bundling of layered software

[buff%pravda@gatech.edu (Richard Billington)]

I doubt that many of your Macsyma users give a damn about the development
environment (at least when they're using macsyma). Similarly, I doubt that
most users have any use for a full-power graphics environment as part of
their standard development environment. Nor have I seen arguments that tools
for building expert systems should be part of a general-purpose workstation.

I am, however, familiar with a substantial body of work which says that the
right way program is with a programming language that provides "persistant
data objects" and that most applications would make use of this, whereas
most don't use a seperate database because the interfaces between prog.
languages and database languages are ... poor.

It also seems to me that most application development involves writing some
kind of documentation, hence a document writing tool is useful (e.g. such
tools, primitive though they be, exist on unix and vms so you can provide
documentation to your users in a system standard form).