Slashdot Mirror
Let's Make UNIX Not Suck
The above is a title of the talk that Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and now Helix Code fame gave at OLS concerning the look and feel of the UNIXs. From what I've heard from attendants the talk was great - and now you too, in the privacy of your own home/cube/lean-to/car can read it.
We have reduced all the complexity that you have described above now. To install, setup and configure your whole system:
lynx -source go-gnome.com | sh
We take care of the library issues for you, and you can focus on compiling Galeon (which we plan on including on Helix GNOME as well in the near future).
Miguel.
If you spend much time looking at .NET, you'd realize that it's essentially built on top of COM itself.
.NET, let alone transcending it.
You need something like DCOM implemented first before you can even think of implementing something like
DNA just wants to be free...
That was a very, very good article by Miguel. Unfortunately the first few posts I have read are from posters who obviously didn't read it and instead are making personal attacks at Miguel.
.NET for one reason only...cross language inheritance. The thought that my C++ components can be inherited by my Perl, Java or Javascript objects makes me extremely *CENSORED*.
Miguel's article is spot on. I love everything about Unix except the fact that Component Based programming is so underused. If there is only one thing Microsoft has done right, it is the way they have developed and pushed COM. With COM, I can write a piece of software that performs a task (be it a Widget or piece of middleware) and COMify it.
Once this is done, anyone can use it regardless of what language it was written in, fast XML parsers can be written in C++ and used in from Javascript or VB. This way developers of business apps do not have to make the choice between a.) putting up with a slow app or b.) writing one themselves with all the attendant bugs therein especially if they have little C++/C skills, also they can go on towards actually creating their application instead of worrying about if they malloced() enough space for their char*'s.
Lots of *nix people believe this implies laziness but fail to realize that reinventing the wheel dozens of times over is folly.
Example I:
I am currently designing and implementing a project management system on Windows(TM) for a small business with a few of my friends. two of them are *nix hackers and they balked at using an XML based protocol to transfer data between the client and server. Now instead of simply designing our protocol then using one of the dozens of available parsers to do this, they decided that we should invent our own binary protocol and write our own parser to parse it.
Our project involves code written in both C++ and Javascript/ASP. We could have used a single COM based parser to consistly interact with the data both from the C++ and the Javascript code but instead its been 2 weeks and counting and our homegrown parser is still being written, tested and debugged. In my opinion this is nothing but a waste of time. When I ask them why not just use XML and an already existing parser their replies boil down to "It just feels wrong.". The chances that a bug or two will slip through in testing or that there is a buffer overflow in our parser is not unlikely considering that most early versions of parsers written in C++ have a few bugs like this hidden somewhere. in this situation component based programming would have allowed us to focus on building and designing our actual application instead of focusing time and energy on a tangential application.
Example II:
At work a MBA intern asked me if it was possible to create an application that housed a search engine that searched a database of MBA students based on criteria like concentration, work experience, graduation date, etc. and then displayed results with links to their resumes in MSFT Word(TM) or HTML format which could be stored on a CD to give recruiters at career fairs. Their first attempt had been to use VB and Access which turned out to be a disaster because of DLL Hell based issues. My simple solution was for them to store all the students in an XML file and to write a Javascript page that used the COM based XML parser (written in C++) to perform the search. Writing this page took less than 2 hours.
Now they have this search functionality they can press on a CD and give out at career fairs which any recruiter can view without needing more than MSIE 4.0 or greater.
Without Component based programming their request would have been impossible to fill in their time frame and would have also required that the recruiters machines would need to fulfill a stricter set of requirements (like a Webserver being installed or they'd have to install an app).
In conclusion my question is "Why has it taken so long for a major *nix push towards component based technology?". After all we've had CORBA for almost a decade but there hasn't been that much a big push towards components. Frankly I am eagerly awaiting MSFT's
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
First of all, to those of you who are criticizing Miguel by saying "Miguel is wrong because being Object Oriented isn't necessary", or "Miguel is wrong because XML isn't necessary", I hope you're keeping this in mind: Miguel's comments can be broken down into two parts("You know, there are two kinds of people in the world..."
1)We should be thinking about ways in which the UNIX philosophy is deficient, rather than continually reassuring ourselves that it's all okay. Look at it pragmatically: Who's got the biggest market penetration? Who's system is easier to learn to program in for the beginner, ignoring cost?
Okay, these are total flamebait questions, so please, please don't respond to these in particular. Use your imagination, and think of some ways in which Windows is better than UNIX, rather than touting all the advantages of your pet operating system. Otherwise, you're just brainwashing yourselves with your own marketing.
The question here isn't which way we should take things, it's how we should think about them. If you want to respond to this half of the question, address what the community should expect of UNIX, not how it should be done.
2)UNIX needs standards, reusability, etc. This is a set of recommendations to the community about where things should go specifically. If you agree to Miguel's motivations in the first part, then read on. His argument is based on looking at "the competition", and I can give you a concrete example.
He mentions IE, and how it's actually made up of a large collection of components rather than being a monolithic application. True. If I want IE's rendering capabilities in my application and I'm using something like Delphi(example because I actually had to do this once), Hell, I'll just draw myself a window and drop the browser component into it. You can argue about whether it's bloated code or not, but the end result is that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel to get something pretty momentous done. Further, I can now focus on doing something with this browser component that hasn't been done before.
For those of you who aren't interested in looking into it, Microsoft is working on something called dotNet. There's a lot of argument about what it all is, and whether it's useful, a product of the devil, etc. The thing that excited me about it is that components from one language can be used in another. And here's where I must admit that I didn't read the details about Bonobo. But my point is that Microsoft is going to have a fully operational Death Star of interoperability between languages pretty danged soon. Miguel rattles off a list of languages:
And this is exactly what isn't going to be the case with dotNet.
I know most of you have lost interest by now, and are happily moderating me down, flaming me, etc., but I have an appeal to those serious programmers and geeks amongst you who bore with me this far. It doesn't matter who came up with it, but isn't that just a bitchin' cool idea???
As you know, everyone who writes about their new features admits that you can already do the same thing in plain old C, but you also know how the rest of it goes.
By now, I've totally lost track of any other points I was going to make, if any. Please fill in the blanks with anything relavent you see:
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!