Re: Programmer knowledge

From: Ian Woods (newspub2_at_wuggyNOCAPS.org)
Date: 03/31/04 

Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 19:08:04 +0000 (UTC)

Programmer Dude <Chris@Sonnack.com> wrote in news:406AF438.5CEBF641
@Sonnack.com:

> Ian Woods wrote:
>
>> Every IBM PC shipped with an MS OS, and later virtually every IBM PC
>> clone shipped with an MS OS. Given that users in general don't even
>> know what an 'operating system' is, how can /anyone/ beat that?
>
> By doing the same thing MS did, but with better software. There's
> absolutely no reason it *couldn't* have happened to Unix. The
> opportunity was certainly there. Unix had a *massive* headstart
> (40 years) and vast share at that time.
>
> How did it happen that this little dog came by and blew Unix out
> of their share and also blew Apple out of the pool? The Mac was
> a better machine at the time. And with a *vast* community of Unix
> hackers at that time.... what happened?
>
>> Just think of the dominant position the C/PM developers would have
>> if IBM had struck a deal with them instead of the fledgling MS.
>
> Exactly. Or a Unix variant. Heck, with a Unix variant, they'd
> have a tried and true OS core. How did the world manage to pass
> by Unix? That's my question. Who was asleep at the switch?
>
> Was it that Unix-garu/Hippie-hacker/Anti-corporation mindset?
> Was Gates just a better more aggressive marketer?

More to the point, if someone else had got in there, would the world be
any different now? Once /someone/ got into that position the current
state of play is effectively innevitable. The details would be different
but there'd still be one huge software company in the desktop OS market
and everyone else getting the scraps. That's just the symptom, not the
disease.
 
>>> Unice fans are off writing a super-tweaked, heavily pipelined,
>>> parallel processing..... version of grep. Fun and personally
>>> rewarding, but pretty useless for 99.999999% of PC users.
>>
>> Alternatively, some of us were out writing innovative new image
>> processing techniques for astronomical telescopes which could
>> give new insights into the physical universe which we live.
>
> And this *requires* Unix?

No, but I was off doing other things. Why should I put my effort into
catering for people who are already catered for?

Incidentally, the software doesn't require unix. I wrote it so that it
will run just about anywhere. It runs on a linux box, it runs on a
windows box, it'll run on a Mac, it'll run on any OS which it can be
compiled for. This is my later point. I could have chosen to make it
require Linux, or Windows, or MacOSX, or QNX or whatever. I really could
have. Many developers /do/ choose to make their code only work on one OS
even though it doesn't need to. I'm not one of them.

>>> ...don't meet real user's needs, and there's a lot more of them
>>> than of us.
>>
>> WHo are these 'real' users, and what do they do?
>
> (I wish you folks would learn to connect your own dots. Who the heck
> do you *think* I mean??) They are the ones that have turned our hobby
> into a full time profession. They are the ones that consume vast #s
> of CPU cycles playing games,

like me...

> writing (HTML) email,

sometimes like me...

> saving recipies,

like me...

> downloading porn,

I can neither confirm or deny...

> surfing the web,

like me

> IRC'ing, etc., etc., etc.

like me.

Seems that I use my computer for most of the same things that the rest of
my family do.

> More importantly, they are crunching corporate data, generating tons
> of spreadsheets, creating presentation documents, writing memos,
> taking surveys, etc., etc., etc.

Oh right. T

>> Specifically, what do they do on Windows which can't be done on
>> Linux, or Solaris, or BeOS, or QNX or....
>
> See my not-too-long-ago thread about SQL database and presentation
> documents. It appears Windows offers *hugely* better ways of
> *casually* sharing complex data between applications. It doesn't
> appear the Unices are even in that ballpark, yet.

Is that part of Windows(TM) or part of the applications though? Isn't it
merely a library shared between the applications which is OS agnostic?
Afterall, under the hood it's only moving data from one processes memory
space to another. IPC of some form is a basic requirement for any modern
OS.

This is a case of someone choosing, for whatever reason, to write
software which requires the underlying OS needlessly IMO.

<snip>

>> Interoperability.
>>
>> At an application level there's absolutely no reason whatsoever why
>> OS specifics need to be used.
>
> Depending on how you mean that, I agree. Bits are bits. However,
> consider something like COM ("ActiveX"). Proprietary aspects aside,
> there's no reason COM can't work on any platform under any OS that
> supports it.

Indeed. And any application can be written using COM and then magically
be usable elsewhere. Another possibility is to use something OS agnostic
which does all the stuff the application needs COM to do, which I'm sure
is already out there somewhere as well (CORBA?). Again, this is a choice.

There are very few applications which specifically need to be tied to any
single platform, even including those that interface hardware like
scanners or digital cameras.

The problem is that there's so much of an incentive for divergence that
getting enough convergence to get widescale interoperability is going to
take time. It's also going to need developers to choose not to tie their
software to one underlying framework but to use what software we have
which is OS agnostic wherever possible.

IMO, it's precisely this which is keeping the software industry from
maturing.

<snip>

> [grin] Since I knew some of you like that dodge, I have been careful
> this time to frame my words in terms of "PCs"!

Even in PCs, many of the processors don't run OSs. (Hint: there's more
than an x86 or PPC processor in there.) :)

.oO(I'm getting good at this dodging thing...)

Ian Woods 

-- 
"I'm a paranoid schizophrenic sado-masochist.
My other half's out to get me and I can't wait."
Richard Heathfield
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