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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Jeremy H. Sproat writes:
> Okay, it's actually starting to make sense.
>
> You're morally opposed to the evilness of Windows, not its usefulness. I'm
> guessing that that evilness is spawned from two factors: the money-grubbing
> empire that is Microsoft; and the buggy software that is Windows. Am I
> correct in assuming that this is it, in a nutshell?
I don't care if MS is a money-grubbing empire as long as they make great
products. The problem I have with it is that they're only making good (not
great) products and that, in combination with their monopolistic nature,
hurts the other guys out there who are making truly great products. And now
this "The Unstoppable Windows NT" stuff on TV -- ha...we'll see.
> With that assumption, I'll make one more just 'cause it's late. Noting that
> UNIX was formed by a money-grubbing empire (Bell labs and later AT&T), and
> that it was buggy as all git out for the longest time (basically until BSD
> surpassed System V in usability), one might ascertain that had you been born
> twenty years earlier, you'd hate UNIX.
That's possible; but more likely that I'd hate AT&T and like Unix.
> But fortunately, UNIX changed, went
> open, evolved into something not only extremely useful but also incredibly fun
> for perhaps millions of computer hobbyists world-wide.
If Microsoft someday produces a great operating system, I'll be willing to
change my mind about them. I doubt they will, but I'll still be open-minded
if they actually do it.
> It's probably as likely that PARC "borrowed" the most popular GUI concepts
> (windowing and menus) from a scientist they were "borrowing" from Apple; he
> brought his ideas in with him from Apple, who liked the idea but liked being
> able to use XEROX's resources even better. (Arg. I have the guy's name, but
> it's in a book on my shelf at work...grumble.)
I wanna hear more about that!
> Someone's got to do it. It sucks, I know, but survival of the fittest will
> win out. Hey -- we learned from VMS, we learned from Amiga, we'll learn from
> Windows.
Heh heh. The gross thing is, MS may be the fittest company, but they don't
produce the fittest products. They sell to the lowest-common denomintor,
because that's where the money is. Can't really blame them too much for that,
I guess.
> > > The rapid growth of the Internet would have never happened.
> >
> > Doesn't that assume that nothing else would have filled in the demand if
> > those two players hadn't been there?
>
> Nothing would have filled the demand. Without the immensly popular Wintel
> platform saturating the market, client/server wouldn't have taken off,
> mainframes would be the big thing, and we'd all be reading this through a
> dumb terminal right now.
Ha ha. :)
Actually, without the immensely popular Wintel platform saturating the market,
something else better (perhaps from Motorola or Digital) could have moved in.
> The computer industry has always been slow. Look at what Babbage and Lady Ada
> accomplished what, a hundred some-odd years ago? Digital encoding a hundred
> years ago, but it took us until the '50s to figure out that it would work just
> as well in digital computers as well as a loom?
Like Leonardo da Vinci's wooden gears, those were ideas that were ahead of
their
time technologically. OOP and GUIs weren't -- they were all totally possible
technologicaly back then, albeit expensive.
> The problem has always been finding a practical application for these new
> toys. What use would a GUI have been, when it was created? What use did OOP
> have without the GUI to help it mature? The mouse has always had a practical
> use, however -- as a trackball.
The first discoverers of OOP understood that it was a far more fundamental
tool than something just for GUIs. GUIs took off when desktop publishing
became the rage, and that was fueled by the invention of the low-cost high-res
printer.
> These things didn't get lost because of the microcomputer.
GUI took a revolution in printers and monitors and DRAM chip technology to
make it affordable. I think OOP got lost because of the different mindset
of the older generation of computer people and the newer younger hacker
generation. Hard to make the case for OOP to unwashed masses of people
springing up around the microcomputer and just wanting to hack (not that
there's anything wrong with that).
> > > Cross-platform is a *good* thing.
> > It is? Always?
> Yes, always. What is the main benefit of cross-platform? It helps promote a
> diversity of hardware and OS architectures. Why should I use BeOS if it
> doesn't run my network applications? What good does TOS do me if I can't get
> it to work with my VAX? Without cross-platform, we'd be stuck using the same
> OS for everything. No OS cross-pollenation would occur, and software would
> ultimately stagnate.
I agree that cross-platform and diversity can be very good for users.
> What is the main drawback of cross-platform? Reduced performance while
> conducting multiple OS checks. It's not that bad a thing when we're getting
> close to a billion calculations per second, IMO.
It's not the performance that's disgusting -- it's the all-too-common lack of
abstraction layers. Things like HTTP and CGI and CORBA and XML and SQL are
***great*** because they abstract the interfaces, making cross-platform non-
gunky. You get to write to a special-purpose API and not have to worry about
the underlying OS. When you know what OS you're running on and your code
has to do special things to fine-tune itself to each environment, that's the
ugly part, the evil part. If you write for general Unix cross-platform
compatibility, a lot of that is hidden away nicely (a lot of it isn't, too).
But Microsoft goes out of its way to make it harder to write abstraction
layers on top of its own layers, or more accurately, they make seductive moves
to developers to entice them into using system-specific stuff to lock them
into the MS platform.
> AHA! Ignorance is getting the better of you here, Todd. :-,
I said I wasn't sure. Those were just examples of the types of garbage that
can show up in so-called "cross-platform" code.
> These things happen transparently on Win32.
Rilly? That's good then. So there aren't any functions in the Win32 Perl
libraries that return backslash for the directory separator? If you call
the CommonDialog DLL to open a filespec, does that return forward slashes
to you?
> I can't speak for DOS or VMS or Mac, but I
> would be genuinely surprised if they didn't exhibit similar behavior.
OK, how about this. Let's say you're writing a tied hash object to implement
a simple lookup via a disk file, where the hash key gets mapped into a file
name. The key has to be encoded, of course, so that characters can be
restricted to only those permitted in filenames. In Unix, you can use ":"
in a filename. But in DOS, you can't...the colon means device. And on the
Mac, the colon is a directory separator. So you could either restrict the
set of allowable characters to some really low common denominator like
alphanumerics, or you could exhaustively pick just those characters which
are available in all of the OS's you support, or you could make the encoder
based on the $^O variable. Isn't that disgusting?
> In fact, if they did introduce such atrocious incompatibilities, that would
> be the fault of the Perl guys, and not the platform.
What if they couldn't avoid it?
> [...]
> Downside = Perl in the next version of IIS, a most heinous piece of software.
> Upside = A better Win32 Perl, still for free.
wretch :)
> There is a Win32 Perl extension from ActiveState, which allows interaction
> with OLE objects. In other words, I'll never write another line of VB code
> again! That, in my view, has helped stike the death blow against VB.
Stop, you're telling me too much. :-(
> No, just spend your time bossing them around and expecting nothing. It's the
> most gratifying feeling in the world, second only to sex. Wait, it's the
> second most gratifying feeling in the world, closely following sex and
> chocolate. Okay, it's the third... :-P
The other day, I just discovered that Godiva has chocolate ice cream that they
sell at the store! More fatty and silky and creamy than any other ice cream I
ever remember tasting. Gawd, it was good. Gonna hafta pick up a couple more
pints of that.
> p.s. Wow, it's late, isn't it? I can tell, because the neighbors have
> stopped doing that noisy thing that neighbors do at 1:30 AM... That, and I
> mentioned sex in .debate...
Uhm, uhm, I think that falls under the category of "too much information." :-,
Cheers
--Todd
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: Perl rules!
|
| (...) Yah, no argument there. I prefer the Windows 4 GUI over almost anything else (1), and I can run a wide range of apps on my NT box. But, I know the difference between reliability and popularity, and for mission-critical apps where down time (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
| | | Godiva Ice Cream (Was: Perl rules!)
|
| (...) This I need to hear more about. Is it available in the grocery store, or do I need to visit a Godiva-only store? (...) Yah. I think he was shingling his roof. Loudly. At 1:30 AM. And from the sound of his voice, he seemed more than a little (...) (25 years ago, 18-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Perl rules!
|
| (...) Hey! I *like* seafood! What are you saying, Todd? :-D (...) I know. :-, That's why I chose the platform to pick on. (...) Okay, it's actually starting to make sense. You're morally opposed to the evilness of Windows, not its usefulness. I'm (...) (25 years ago, 17-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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