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I wanted to give all the HP3000 developers a heads up on the latest
version of WhisperTech Programmer Studio (PS).  It has been discussed a
little previously on this list, but since it has now gone from beta to
full production release some observations are warranted.

One of my programmer analysts has been evaluating PS since beta releases
began being posted on WhisperTech's web site (www.whispertech.com) this
fall.  The first production release was posted at the beginning of
December.  As an indication of what we think of PS, we ordered copies
for all our MPE and HP-UX developers last week.

This is an outstanding product.  It provides an integrated development
environment (very similar to Microsoft Visual C++) for host based
development.  When my analyst showed it to some of the other staff, my
manager immediately said it looked great.  When he asked about the price
and was told it is $599 (plus support, less in volume) per user, he
exclaimed "Order it for everybody!"

Many of you are grizzled veterans who are quite satisfied with Qedit,
Quad, vi, etc.  You may not be as impressed with Programmer Studio or
Qedit for Windows given that you have become comfortable with those
other products.  But that is a very narrow view of the world.  If you,
like us, are hiring young, entry level staff, and paying them well, you
owe it to them to provide the best available tools.  And PS is one of
those tools that can make a difference.

While new staff still will need to learn about MPE and your
applications, at least they will no longer have a learning curve for
entering and editing source code.  Anyone who has ever used a Windows
text editor can get started in PS.

You owe it to yourself and your staff to download an evaluation copy
from WhisperTech's web site.  And don't only evaluate it yourself; give
it to one of your enthusiastic programmers for a complete test drive.

PS:  We also evaluated Qedit for Windows (www.robelle.com) and found it
quite nice, but not as advanced for programmers as Programmer Studio.
We feel Qedit for Windows would be very nice for our data processing
users who edit job streams and report specification files on the HP3000.


Rob Joseph
The NPD Group
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