On 22 Mar 2017, at 22:35, Nick Downing <downing.nick(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It was not just the convenience and productivity improvements but that the
'hit' was coming harder and faster.
I think this is completely right, and is the reason that really interactive / resident
environments can be so catastrophically addictive. Even on a fairly slow machine it
doesn't take more than a second or so to compile a single function, and the whole
edit/save/compile/link/debug cycle becomes compressed to edit/compile-one-function/debug,
with cycle times of a few seconds. I have quite seriously lost a year of my life this
way, although I am reasonably sure that part of the problem is that the Xerox d-machines
were actually made by the Fair Folk and using them for any length of time results in the
standard issues associated with dealing with artifacts of the Fay.