[tarkin2]

The final paragraph hits home. The specialisation required has not necessarily empowered ordinary users without dedicating their lives to the tool:

"Unix and C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write her or his own code (and the average astronomer's C is much, much worse than his Fortran used to be). The powers-that-be in the software world of course have always felt that "ordinary" users (astronomers in this case) should be using software and not writing it. The cynic might feel that since those same powers nearly all make their living by writing software, and get even more pay when they manage other programmers, then they have a vested interest in bringing about a state of affairs where the rest of us are reduced to mere supplicants, dependent on them for all our software needs. It is clear that Unix does not pose an insuperable barrier --- the ever-expanding armies of hackers out there are evidence enough that the barrier can be scaled given enough time and enthusiasm for the task. But hacking is not astronomy, and hackers are not astronomers, and it is astronomy and astronomers I worry about. We shouldn't have to scale the Unix barrier, and it is all the sadder because, since the advent of a VMS-based Starlink, ordinary astronomers have had something denied to most other scientists in this country --- readily accessible, reliable, user-friendly computing power that can be easily harnessed to a particular astronomical requirement. Maybe VMS does baby its users. Maybe we have paid more per Specmark so that we could use the Specmarks we had efficiently. But along with the rest of the world, we are now losing this nice friendly system. As with instrumentation and the National Observatories, we are having to teach our students how to fit their problems to facilities provided by others, whereas the UK reputation in astronomy was created by fitting the facilities to the problem."