New forum topic - Open Control
Feb 19, 2002 12:26 pm, by Michael Griffin
Text :
My own impression of the reason behind this problem (and it is a serious one) is a bit different from yours. I did some investigation (telephone calls, etc.) for why a certain PLC's software was not able to accept files from versions with trivial differences (no changes which would affect the PLC or the code it received). The conclusion that I reached was that it was due to laziness and stupidity rather than greed and malice.

I spoke to certain people in the company's marketting department, and they
were at least as unhappy about the situation as I was. The story they were receiving from their software developers was that it was all necessary because the PLC used "compiled instead of interpreted code". Since the programming software is dealing with a source code file, this was self evident nonsense. The real reason was more like "I can't be bothered with what customers want, this was easier for me, go away".

I have been getting the impression lately (and not just with this situation) that there has been an influx of programming and software design staff with little or no experience with what customers in industry really need. They've produced some very flashy Windows programs without the functionality or balance of features which existed in their DOS predecessors.
Some of these programs are almost unusable unless you are sitting at a desk with a large monitor and a mouse. I have a hundred tool bars with fancy graphics, but my program is squished down into a tiny corner of my screen when I'm out on the plant floor. Have the people who dream these things up ever used them in real life?
The situation seems to be improving, but I have to wonder why these companies had to learn the same lessons over again which they had apparently forgot from their earlier days.

I found a way of dealing with the file compatability problem on a short term basis though. I was able to export the file in ASCII format, and import it again into the older version. The software had no problems with this - as it obviously shouldn't since it is dealing with identical instructions in either case. So the question arises - why couldn't I do this directly?

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Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
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