Comments on: OpenT : A Free Alternative to Holtsoft’s Proprietary Turing IDE

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:02:14 +0000

@McKenzie – if all the schools had distribution licenses, we wouldn’t be seeing “download turing” search queries in our reference logs In the real world, HoltSoft’s business model should have failed, but the problem is that they sell to school boards. As with any other large corporation / vendor / etc, having paid for a product gives an illusion of support. No, I have no idea what kind of support one could possibly require for Turing, the installation process is limited to copying all the files to the same folder.

@Nick – well first of all Java is not that far off from C plus plus (apparently the plus signs are stripped out of the comments). And that’s not even the problem. Turing’s slow execution speed has to do with it’s poor implementation of the interpret/compile process. Notice the 600Kb “Hello World” executables.

OpenT will be a much faster implementation of Turing.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:35:59 +0000

I think it is great that this project is under way and I hope that it is a success. Just one thing that I’m wondering about and think might be an issue. A major problem with Holtsoft’s Turing is that it is quite slow. How will OpenT compare to Turing in terms of speed? I would think that it would end up slower since Turing was written in C , and OpenT is in Java, but I may be wrong.

By: McKenzie

McKenzie — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:02:13 +0000

When you mention Turing’s $75 price tag, I think it’s important to point out that Holt does offer Student Distribution licenses as well. It’s a one-time cost to distribute within a major version number (e.g. 4.x) It cost our school $750 (based on the number of machines we have that run Turing) and I charge students who want a copy $2, with the hopes of one day paying off the $750.

That said, I’m not sure I understand Holt’s business model. Seems to me most of their income comes from selling books. Charging for their software in an environment of excellent open source software might just cause schools to look elsewhere for their programming languages.

As far as the project goes it would be great practice for you guys to work on, and I’m sure you would find enough students who would love to use it at home.