Slashdot Mirror
Spolsky Stands Firm on Linux on the Desktop
erlando writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution is running an interview with Joel Spolsky (from JoelOnSoftware) in which he responds to this earlier thread here on Slashdot. In short: He defends his position and makes some interesting remarks on Linux and the desktop."
JOEL:It may be true for the software that Eick evaluated. It's not true for the software that I've written, because I tend to refactor and clean things up regularly.
His argument is that code doesn't rust however he argues it by saying that he "refactors and cleans things up regularly". Perhaps he needs to think about that one a little more.
I found this quote (from a Slashdotter) quite funny:
I was in a company that was run by technical people, but when the company ran into financial trouble, decided to become more "market oriented".
They hired a bunch of professional executives, marketing people, etc. Marketing was put in charge of determining product direction, as they knew what the customer wanted.
Well it turned out that the technical people were in fact smarter than the marketing and PR guys, who seemed to think that software could be created by committees and meetings and lots of vision. The company sank like a rock."
(S)He blames the downfall of the company on the marketing people, and yet had stated earlier that they were already in trouble anyway. Sounds to me like the company was doomed irrespective of the marketdroids.
slashdotters are not exactly famous for reading the things they are commenting on
Oh well...
free the mallocs!
I doubt that it will be enough for WINE developers to catch up with Win95. No one uses the out-of-the-box version of Win95 anymore, do they? There's all sorts of updates you need to get your software running and, yes, those updates include additions/changes to the API.
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Joel says he's been programming for 20 years. Is any of his code available for public review? I looked at his web page briefly but nothing jumped out at me.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.
These are great mysteries.
free the mallocs!
Most software projects are made by teams and as in any team activity, its the weakest and strongest links that will determine the success of the team.
Take any game like hockey or basketball, many teams have exceptional players but they don't win championships. Those that do play with teamwork on their minds that's why whey get to win.
Blaming marketing or second-rate programmers is not the way to go it should be a team effort wo win because not many games are played solo like tennis or golf. Even those games require seconds that provide valuable support to the player.
Return the bells of Balangiga.
"Bloatware isn't actually costing you anything"!? How about more time to load your application and a significantly higher probability of it crashing as the code becomes more bloated and less maintainable?
There is a gigantic chasm of a difference between "bloatware" of information, and bloatware of software features.
Joel seems to admire himself for doing just that, as when he talks about why his own code doesn't decay (he keeps freshening it up, you see. In other words, rewriting it over time).
This is easier to do when it's just his code, versus a large set that more than one person maintaining it over a decade (like the evaluated software that was foudn to 'decay').
Also, Joel stated that the problems with Outlook were with "1%" of the code, but that is not the point. The slashdot comment was not commenting on the quality of Outlook's code, but on the flaws inherent in the design of the application (such as executing untrusted software and not following mime type information when passing data to the OS). I think that the post was talking about a redesign, which would mean a rewrite, and Joel dodged that one (or just didn't understand it). Fixing bugs in good features is different from tossing bad features.
I know this may come as a shocker, but Joel may not necessary be right all the time. But I have followed some of his work for a few years, and he defiently is qualified to say the things he says. So don't blow him off.
In short: He defends his position and makes some interesting remarks on Linux and the desktop.
WHAT IS HIS POSITION?
I realize links are provided that can be scrutinized to determine this, but there is a reason a space for 'story summary' is provided...
"And like that
"Half the time when I go into a function to fix a little bug, I figure out a cleaner way to rewrite the whole function, so over time it gets better and better. "
So it's not that his code rots with time
Sounds like he could save quite a bit of time and maintanence nightmare if he just invested the effort to write it well the first time. It may sound negative, but this guy is a constant wealth of contradictions. He doesn't advocate re-writes of the product, but 'half the time' re-writes functions? Doesn't he know that the function *is* a product?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
True, scrapping and re-creating Outlook is certainly not cost-effective for the Microsoft.
Unfortunately the current Outlook mess is not very cost effective for their customers, just hit by the worm-du-jour.
So I guess it just depends from whose perspective you define "cost-effectiveness".
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Once every open-sourcer has seen their marriage break up by installing Linux on their non-technical spouse's computer, they'll finally understand that, no, most people don't prefer command lines.
Non-technical Spouse: "No, honey, the reason I had an affair with the baby-sitter was because you installed Slackware."
Joel Spolsky makes good points and his articles are usually excellent reading, regardless if you agree with him or not --I usually do. However, I think he over-generalizes his conclusions based on his own experience --selling consumer-oriented, "shrink-wrap" software. He leaves the entire enterprise software world out of his viewpoint and some of his conclusions don't make sense in that sphere.
For example, I tend to agree that "software doesn't rust". But that holds if your customer is Joe Q Public; it doesn't (usually) hold for enterprises. E.g. his Net Present Value calculation in the article doesn't take into account opportunity cost, i.e. the competitive advantage a company would gain if it upgraded their old F77 program into a faster one, with more mindshare (easier to lure/train IT staff) and more features that would increase productivity and lower costs.
Again, I do usually agree with Joel and read his essays religiously, but I wish he opened his worldview to the rest of the software industry.
Or, here's an argument that even the youngest slashdotters will understand. The WWW is bloatware. Finding things is impossible because there's so much stuff out there. Think how much hard drive space is wasted on all kinds of web pages that only .00000000001% of the world ever reads. Since the vast majority of people only go to Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN, wouldn't the WWW be better if it only had Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN? It would be much more "optimized."
One difference is I don't run the entire WWW on my computer.
"And like that
Hmm...There's nothing preventing any company out there using slashdot comments as interview material for the entire content of their site, right?
It feels weird unknowingly providing content for a for-profit site I don't (often) visit or care about, but I suppose my comments are public-domain once I've posted them here?
I know it doesn't fit in with the copyleft thing, but shouldn't they at least have to ask before using slashdot content for their own means?
You have what I would call a superiority complex. I would say that is completely normal for a technically inclined or computer competant person. One thing you dont have, which is quite evident in your last statement, is a simple respect for your peers.
Now, I may not directly consider you a peer, for the simple fact that we differ on a number of simple comparitive issues. You are stuck in the past. Since you will most definitely ask for some type of proof of this, allow me to explain.
In your responce to the question regarding the recode of a fortran program, you responded:
Do you hold on to an old 286, even though it could easily crash purely because of its old-hardware, just because it works? Do you hold on to a 1982 Toyota Corolla, just because it works? No. For the safety of you data, and for the safty of your family, you go and get new stuff.
Of course, your responce will be well, programs dont degrade with time. I say they do. Allow me to elaborate once again.
I've worked on a number of programming projects. One of which works perfectly, but we are still planning a complete rewrite of. For a matter of context, I'll involve the name. The Bahamut IRCd happens to be presently supporting over 130,000 simultanious connections between about 30 servers. It will probably be quite good until well over 200,000 connections. But we're rewriting it anyway. Because we've learned one thing the hard way. Dont wait for problems to come to you. Just because your software works fine with 10,000 users, doesnt mean its going to scale to 11,000 users.
Programming in *any* arena is not cut and dry. Programs are *never* "perfect", as you as a software developer should know. If you've worked on any project of any reasonable size, then you realize that there is a point where picking through old code to improve software isnt worth your time, and you can simply rewrite the whole damn thing to do what you want and accually have spent less time doing it.
.
Spolsky asserts that Linux won't be a player in the desktop market until it can run Windows applications. I find this a very puzzling assertion--one I've seen elsewhere. Certainly the case of OS/2 clearly refutes this notion: OS/2 could run Windows applications, could even run them better than Windows itself, but then, why run OS/2 when you could just run Windows, and (more importantly) why _develop_ for OS/2 when by developing for Windows you could cover both bases.
I spot a flaw in my analogy, which is that OS/2 was a commercial competitor, while Linux is "free" and therefore more attractive.
hyacinthus.
That almost all new apps are *tested* on the plain vanilla Windows95. So if WINE gets to that level, all of those tested apps will work fine on WINE.
He's not saying that there are a ton of people out there using unmodified Win95, just that the vast majority of Windows programmers program with that possibility in mind.
Once every open-sourcer has seen their marriage break up by installing Linux on their non-technical spouse's computer, they'll finally understand that, no, most people don't prefer command lines.
My S.O. is not a computer geek, but is fairly good with computers. She likes working at home on Linux, and complains regularly about MS-Win2k at work. She says, "It won't let me do anything."
Installing Linux hasn't destroyed my marriage. In fact, since I've installed Linux, she's agreed to marry me.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
That you didn't seem to perceive. He was saying that removing or denying even some of the smallest features is not a good thing.
I don't see how your argument can counter-attack his. Sure, you don't run the www on your computer. But still, you 'run' the www when you browse the internet. Doesn't matter where the features are located, the point is somewhere, somehow, someone might need.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
I also think that Win95 compatibility - but 100% - would be enough for most non-games.
Some programmers still do write closed source software, remember?
> SMS: Another interesting point was raised in reference to bloatware... Do you ...The WWW is bloatware. Finding things is impossible because there's so .00000000001% of the world ever reads. Since the vast majority of
> think a product like Microsoft Word would benefit by having every feature that is
> used by 1% or less of the installed base removed from the product?
>
> Joel:
> much stuff out there. Think how much hard drive space is wasted on all kinds of web
> pages that only
> people only go to Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN, wouldn't the WWW be better if it only had
> Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN? It would be much more "optimized."
With Joel from Microsoft at the helm the entire contents of the Internet would reside on a single loooooong web page.
The oposite of MS-Bloatware (TM) is not lack of features. The opposite is UN*X's lean tool approach. Use tools for one function or a small set of tightly related functions. Create a screwdriver to screw screws, a hammer to nail nails. You do not create a Rube Goldberg machine with a flight simulator.
___
Anonymity is freedom!
"Sounds like he could save quite a bit of time and maintanence nightmare if he just invested the effort to write it well the first time."
You people seem to be going out of your way to miss Joel's point on this.
Routine code maintenance (ie, refactoring code, adding small improvements, etc.) is a standard part of the development cycle that every good software team follows. Doing so does not mean that the product wasn't written well the first time. (You Linux people should know that better than any of us, but I digress...)
Code maintenance is not the same thing as a complete code rewrite, which is what Joel is arguing against. Incidentally, lack of proper code maintenance over time will likely result in the unwieldy mess that Stephen Eick describes.
So does code rust? Of course not. Does poorly-developed, unmaintained code rust? Maybe, but that still doesn't mean that everything should be rewritten from scratch.
Joel thinks that rewriting things is a bad idea because it loses information embedded in the old code (original anti-rewrite essay, search for "Nancy" to find a good example) and then says in the interview:
This is the same guy who wrote Yet Another Bug Tracking System while observing that such things were a dime a dozen, and then went on to write Yet Another Content Management System without defining its target market, even as he criticized others for such undirected development. Apparently, Joel's quite comfortable stating commandments for others while living by different rules himself. His articles are unfailingly interesting, but should by no means be accepted as authoritative (as is true for anyone who spends more time on the pundit circuit than actually programming)
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Yes, Slashdot is a public forum, but posters still retain copyright on their comments, and if they're excerpted and posted in another public publication, attribution, or at least a hyperlink to the original comment in context strikes me as the proper (and legal) thing to do.
Perhaps it was felt that a single link to the thread holding all the comments was sufficient, but I tend to disagree.
You could've hired me.
DirectX
IE5
Windows Media Player
Windows Installer
Active Directory
All of these modify, or extend the Win32 API under Win95 when installed.
Sounds like he could save quite a bit of time and maintanence nightmare if he just invested the effort to write it well the first time.
Yes, software development would be a breeze if we could write perfect code the first time.
Joel was commenting about a study that indicates that software does "decay." In one old project, a lot files had to be touched for a simple change; then, after what amounts to a "refactoring," changes were more localized. after time, the old situation recurred, in which a lot of files had to be modified for a change.
Joel's reply (paraphrased) consisted of, "Well, perhaps for *that* study. But *my* code doesn't rot. I'm constantly refactoring it!" So he claims the study doesn't apply to his software, because he's constantly refactoring his code.
He needs either to read the questions before answering them, or get struck repeatedly with a Very Large Cluestick.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I could rant a bit about how wrong (or right) Joel is about lots of topics, but that would be a little redundant.
Instead, I would like to say thank you. Thanks, Joel, for writing about your opinions and experiences, the lessons you learned, what you did wrong. Thanks for taking the time to tell us. It doesn't matter if we agree with you or not. Thanks for trying to help, you centainly help me a lot.
I was going to respond with the same open-minded ness I had on the last article.. but after reading his comments... He leaves no doubt...
He has no clue and just likes to hear himself talk... another name for me to add to my wanna-be from microsoft list.
Please Joel, you make yourself sound less credible with the way you talk.. and please stop interjecting things you make up for shock value, this isn't morning radio.. sane people don't leave their spouse over linux, so stop the shock-jock act.. it just makes more of the community write you off as hack.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What he's saying is 'If I'm working on Foo.bar, and it's got 10 functions, if I'm in function 1, I might notice a better way to do what function 1 does, so I implement it. Better program.' What he's railing against is the huge mass of programmers who would say 'Because function 1 is broken, lets rewrite ALL 10 FUNCTIONS because we can.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
It's not true for the software that I've written, because I tend to refactor and clean things up regularly. Half the time when I go into a function to fix a little bug, I figure out a cleaner way to rewrite the whole function, so over time it gets better and better.
In other words, his code decays MUCH faster than anyone elses. Glad he doesn't work for me. At "half the time", that means he's costing any project 50% more in his time/dollar worth. Ouch!
Don't even talk to me about spending money replacing something that works.
No, he doesn't replace an application at one time, it does it over a period of time, one function at a time. LOL!
Well, most people with encyclopedias only look up 0.01% of the topics in the encyclopedia. But would you rather have the Encyclopedia Britannica or would you rather have a lightweight brochure containing the top 100 topics?
What? I thought they were asking about optimization and maintaining code that no one used?!?! Perhaps he answered a different question for Reader's Digest and was confused.
The good news is that a lot of stuff I write about UI is starting to have an impact on the Gnome and KDE people. There's a lot more appreciation for the value of good UI than there used to be in the Linux community. Once every open-sourcer has seen their marriage break up by installing Linux on their non-technical spouse's computer, they'll finally understand that, no, most people don't prefer command lines.
Hmmm....and I thought this was a process of evolution simply because neither KDE or GNOME can snap their fingers and have everything under the sky that makes everyone happy. Gosh, it's taken MS how many years and they still don't have it right. Suddenly this is all about you Joe? Ya, I'm sure the face of UI is changed because you're the only one that can understand how computers are used. Oh ya...I forgot...you're the only one with parents that use computers...
Well, I write code every day, and have done so for most of the last 20 years. I think this is pretty self evident if you read what I write on my site, but slashdotters are not exactly famous for reading the things they are commenting on!
Seems I read what you said and I must say, aside from your high opinion of your self, you don't seem to understand much else.
I liken the 'never rewrite' issue to MySQL. Yeah yeah, MySQL is cool and all and we all like it for interesting tasks and whatnot, but there are several glaring, fundamental problems with the database engine (filesystem buffered writes, inability to use more than one index on a query, no clustered indexes, crappy query optimizer etc.). In the spirit of object-oriented design, they said, "Well heck, we'll just allow different table types to be complied in and then we can avoid doing the hard work". In theory, this is interesting, but in practice, it is far less than they had hoped.
InnoDB doesn't store a count of rows, so select count( * ) from table now takes far, far longer to return a result. Most RDBMs' operate this way, but to a developer who hasn't experienced that before (since MyISAM/Gemini store a count in the table) it would be confusing and not entirely intuitive why this happens. Not only that, but since text/blob/etc. information is stored on the row (instead of off-row like, again, other RDBMs') users of textual data now may find the hard row-size limit of InnoDB a problem when working with large amounts of text data (like it used to be in PostGRES).
Gemini has their own sets of problems, some of which are due to MySQL's horrendous lock-manager (if such a thing exists). When you perform a table scan on a Gemini table, it appears that it will not escalate the table scan to a full table lock but instead dutifully lock each and every row (and it appears that it does not release the lock after it 'passes' the row either, only when the entire result set is dumped). In these sorts of cases, a table lock is far more efficient since you'll save the lock manager of maintaining count( * ) locks for your table. Also, since it is difficult to manage (if at all) the transaction log, deletions or modifications of many rows can cause it to choke on the massive amount of data in order to roll-back the transaction.
Now, I don't want to make this a "I Hate MySQL" post, but I think it illustrates the "Well we can just make these little incremental changes here or there, or maybe make it modular so that we can simply 'hack in' new features whenever we think them up!" fallacy that Joel seems to love to stick by. It hasn't worked for MySQL, and for sufficiently complex applications I don't think it would work there either. There comes a time in which you must say "Well shit, we did it wrong. And all our core functions are locked in the old, broken way of thinking. If we re-do the core functionality, then we can be more competitive, have a better product, etc." Are we asking them to start over from scratch? In most cases I think that would be a bad idea. Obviously the MySQL parsing engine (which determines if SQL statements are valid) is 'good enough'; there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. However their lock manger could use a good overhaul.
Or as Brooks said in The Mythical Man-Month "Plan to throw one away, you will anyway."
Thanks,
--
Matt
From the Article:
"Our interview was reported on at www.slashdot.org, a lively location on the web dedicated to expounding the joys of Open Source programming, Linux, UNIX, and anarchy (among other things)."
Open Source, Linux and Anarchy? Oh come on! I think we should "kill -9" anyone who believes that. Please share this post with all of your friends.
Off the top of my head, USB support comes to mind, as well as the networking stack (I may be wrong about that one, though). Since I'm not a Windows developer, I can't name specific API's however, so you've got me there.
I'm basing my statement solely on the fact that there's a ton of updates for Windows since 95. Often these updates affect core OS functions. Also, every time you install a new version of a Microsoft app, such as Office or Internet Explorer, you're in reality updating half of your operating system (Win98 w/ windowsupdates applied dilligently, Office2k and Explorer 5.5 is basically the same thing as WinME, for example). Then there's DirectX, that isn't a part of vanilla Win95. Without a recent version of it, your games won't run (mostly). Finally, though I admit I'm threading on developer territory here where maybe I shouldn't (flame away), I know MFCxx.DLL has seen a few updates, almost every Windows app depends on this DLL and recent ones (those that were made with VisualStudio 6, say) depend on the latest version of it being present. There's probably quite a few people here who can shed light on exactly how fundamental the latest changes in this API library are. As a Windows user, I can only attest to the fact that nearly every app you install will make sure 4.2 is present. Since this DLL provides a lot of the core functions of Windows, this alone means that the WINE developers can't just aim for Win95 compatibility and leave it at that.
My point is that there is no such thing as 'vanilla Windows 95' in use today (except on a, I imagine, very limited number of glorified typewriters that run nothing more recent than Office 95 or whatever it's called). I *seriously* doubt that what this guy says is true, about developers making sure their apps will run on 'vanilla Windows 95'. I, for one, can't think of a single app that does.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I install, say, Office 2000 on my Win95 machine, doesn't it update many dll's that were part of the original OS installation? That being the case, is it really true to say that new software runs on Win95, or is it more accurate to say that each new app provides an incremental OS upgrade?
Nope, no sig
Having apparently never worked on a team in the Real World and had a piece of code delivered that was so hideous that the only thing you could really do with it is have it taken out and shot. XP Practices can help you avoid having such a hideous piece of code delivered in the first place, but you'll have a had time convincing small shops to do pair programming.
I agree that what he suggests is XP-like, but it doesn't require pair programming. You can't make a 3 story house of cards into a full-sized brick house, no matter how hard you try - design is paramount to refactoring.
I think people get confused when they read about XP and think design is ignored and everything is done "as you go". It's definitely not! You still have to keep in mind where you are going, even though you are only implementing for the present. Not only does that enable you to refactor, but also cuts down the refactoring time itself.
Joel's code is inherently refactorable because he's used to writing like that - and used to refactoring. What Joel hasn't said is that you have to purposely make your code easily refactorable from the outset, otherwise you'll spend your whole life refactoring from one feature to another.
So take your hideous house of cards into the middle of the street and shoot it if you have to. Refactoring may just be a waste of your time if the design is not easily refactorable.
----- rL
And if you have no Fortran programmers or consultants available at all, how are you going to rewrite it from scratch? All the business rules documented in there, all the bugs that (as Joel points out) have been fixed over time, are going to be lost to you. If the app works except for small part X, find the money and hire a consultant to fix. They're out there.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
No one uses the out-of-the-box version of Win95 anymore, do they?
Two things about Win95:
1. Microsoft no longer supports Windows 95.
2. USB is not natively supported in the early versions of Win95 (and later versions are spotty, they get it right by Win98).
So on that level, Joel's arguments are flawed. Less and less people will be testing on Win95 because MS doesn't support it any more. The WIN baseline now starts at Win98.
Another thing: if you DO use Win95, do you test the off-the-CD version or the highly patched (practically Windows 98) version? Grey grey grey area, Joel.
----- rL
Sounds like he could save quite a bit of time and maintanence nightmare if he just invested the effort to write it well the first time.
r k thinking. If you only need your function to do one thing right now, only implement the one thing right now. No use making the function more complicated - you'll only 1) take more time to implement it and 2) make it more complex which adds opportunity for bugs and increased testing cases to handle.
This is counter to the XP get-it-out-the-door-with-the-minimum-amount-of-wo
Having minimally implemented functions also lets you have an almost-always exectuable codebase, which is important to XP.
When you see that the functionality NEEDS to be extended, you extend it. Not before. You can still make the design before you write in that code for the other 4 features, but holding off from coding and then refactoring them in later incrementally will make your testing and maintaining life a lot easier. Just keep in mind you are going to refactor if you want to make it easier to incorporate them in.
----- rL
You dance near to the issues, but what really needs to happen is for several OSS alternatives to Micro$soft wares to become popular on Windows. Once that happens, switching to Linux, *BSD, or whatever else might come down the pike becomes easy and logical (ie: 'We already use X, Y, and Z software, which run on this 'Linux' too, may as well have a more stable environment at a lower cost too').
MS does not have a monopoly because of Windows, they have a monopoly in spite of it.
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
I havent read the first article they refer to, but the linked-interview give you a pretty good idea about what it was about.
.00000000000000000000001% people that have a craving to read about fishing in nothern norway(or some other wierd thing), the WWW will have a page for u(and btw. what the freak would be the purpose of having yahoo if they only could index ebay and msn? doooh!).
- with-overinflated-egos can understand it:
An I must say, it baffels me anybody want to argue with that guy. He one big contradiction,but i wont even comment on this since i saw a few comments on that subject
already and this really talk for it self:
that once a piece of a program has been debugged and various workarounds added, it represents a repository of stored knowledge and should be left alone
a bit furter down the text we see(as a counter to a argument from a slashdotter):
It's not true for the software that I've written, because I tend to refactor and clean things up regularly.
But why not argue his point with him?Conversation/discussion is a be good, and people tend to learn from it.
Because hes a pain-in-the-***. You ever met one of thiese programmers who made a obvious mistake. But you need to argue 28 minutes with them, begging them to fix it. And they throw alsorts of wierd examples at you, just prolonging getting the job done. Thiese guys dont want constructive input, they just want to be right.
Joel needs to chill out. And stop talking about people that doenst share his views as interlectual inferiors("But not everybody writes code well" , "younger slashdotters" etc).
Learn to have a discussion without creating lame examples to "protect" your own argument. Im thinking about the Encyclopedia example.. Thats the worst B******* ive ever read.
If you buy a encyclopedia, its probertly to access to information about stuff you want to learn more about. Hence the "applications" job is to provide information, having only 100 words would be an incomplete application. The entire purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide you with information you didnt know you needed when you bougth the books.
A wordprocessor application which doensnt feature the newest 20meg office assistent, text taperingtool, access integration etc. couldnt be defined as an incomplete application, just a application with is less rich on features. Bacially the applications can do the same thing, create documents. A 100 word encyclopedia wont do the same job as a full one, so, they cant be compared.
And for the WWW example, again same thing. Information gaterhing. And even the younger of us slashdotters know that what is great about the WWW is that if you are one one the
Simply put, so even the older-softwaremarketsolutions.com-article-authors
A WWW without webpages, or a encyclopedia with 100 words is not comparable to a wordprocessor/emailclient/what-ever-app with out office assistents , 3D logo generater, HTML wizards, Office exporter.
Its more comparable to a wordprocessor with out keyboard support.
Outlook strips all executable attachments, period. Outlook XP does that, Outlook 2000 does that after you've installed the service release (free download).
A rewrite is not necessary, it's already fixed. However, there are still people believing that we're living in 1996 or something and that nothing has changed.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
The Baggage Factor.
- former Microsoft programmer
Well, I guess I'd tell the programmers that I do have that they won't get their next paycheck until they learn FORTRAN and fix the program. It's a pretty straightforward language. With this extra bit of motivation, I'd bet it would be fixed by the next pay period :-).
If it worked just fine and I had no reason to upgrade, yes.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
Oh, uh. maybe y2k? or maybe 2028? or maybe > 5k employees? or any number of other things?
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Yes but there is a lot of stuff MISSING from 95 (I.e. Color management). If your app depends on it, then 95 isn't going to work. I will also testify that a lot of software's base is now 98 instead of 95 because of the basic API functionality it reqires is not present in 95. Only apps that don't require color calibration (Among other things) can be speced for 95.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Check out this page for more information about necessary and sufficient conditions.
For the record, I take no position about whether running Windows apps is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for the success of Linux on the desktop.
-- $SIGNATURE
Which is becoming largely irrelivent. This is very much like OS/2 and it's "windows" subsystem. It came out, could run all win16 (Windows 3.x) apps. Only problem was, Windows 95 just came out and windows 3.1 emulation very quickly became totally irrelivent.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Color Management
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
There are plenty of times I have thrown up my hands in disgust because some nutball wants to re-write a perfectly good app in the hot language of the moment.
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However, I live everyday with a badly thought out program married to absolutely bizzare methods for socket and thread support. If the very core of the program is rotten and maintenance costs more than a re-write then by the above author's own admission the project needs re-writing.
I have seen both sides and extremists drive me nuts in all things.
Don't throw out something that works and works well.
Fix the program that works but does not work well.
Re-write the program that does not work, breaks all the time and costs too much to keep in its current state.
This is not freakin' rocket science!
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ACK
Office now requires RichEdit 3.0, version 3 of the *system control* RichEdit. Since Win95 only has RichEdit 1.0 by default, an Office installation has to upgrade the OS -- and it does.
Interestingly, Microsoft does NOT allow ISVs to distribute RichEdit 3, nor do they make it available as a simple download from MS.
This creates two classes of application vendor. First class vendors are those named "Microsoft", and they are allowed to target the entire installed base for maximum revenue, upgrading any OS version to *make* it meet minimum requirements.
Second class vendors are all others, and if they need the same thing Office needs, RichEdit 3 for example, they are advised to get their customers to go buy an OS upgrade from MS.
Whether this is "fair" or not isn't my point. MS owns the whole platform. You can have any scraps that they don't want.
If you clone the Win98 API, apps from second-class vendors, everyone other than MS, will probably run fine. The apps from the first-class vendor, Microsoft, probably won't.
I say "Win98" instead of "Win95" because of the large number of vendors who have ceased to support Win95. If they can't upgrade the OS themselves, they either have to give up older OSes or give up some functionality that people are used to having in MS's own apps. Most have chosen to compromise, giving up some market, the Win95 platform for now, as well as the most recent nifty(Win2K+) features. In a couple of years, these vendors will be giving up Win98, too, so WINE *does* have to keep moving.
That's the nature of the platform. There are two "installed bases", a big one for MS and a smaller one for everyone else.
MS has made "3rd party horizontal app" an oxymoron on their platform. If WINE wants to run the most popular (a.k.a. "horizontal") apps, it has to keep up with the latest OS versions. Lotsa luck.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I'd like to point out that they are not using slashdot content, they are using written speach.
Do you want to have to ask every time before saying, "So and so said, 'such and such'"?
I didn't think so...
At least I hope not, Gawd!!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Umm, since when do the KDE/Gnome people base their UI design on the writings/ramblings of Spolsky? News to me.
www.riceboypage.com
I'm not quite sure what "refactorable" means, but I want my code to be like this:
* Good Cohesion
* Low Coupling
* No Duplication
It seems to me that the point of refactoring is often to make the code be this way. I don't think code has to already be good to refactor it, though mediocre code is clearly easier to work with than terrible code.
To refactor code in object-oriented programming is just another way of saying you have to redesign a chunk of your class hierarchy to accomodate new features, or to eliminate bugs/bad behavior. If you're at the end of your release life cycle, and you're "refactoring", it probably means you've painted yourself into a design corner and you're now having to "refactor" your way out.
The goal of good design, imnsho, is to avoid refactoring. One way to help yourself, your programming team and company do this is to employ design patterns. One of the main strengths of design patterns is, they force you, the designer/implementor, to consider strongly the long-term reusability and extensibility of your code. If you've worked with any of the standard design patterns from the "Gang of Four" book, you'll know what I mean (written by Gamma, Vlissides, et al.)
So, when he talks about "refactoring" things from ten down to one, yes, it sounds like he's found a way to save some coding or CPU time, maybe, but it also sounds like he wasn't generic or abstract enough to accomodate whatever new feature got added.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Wrong, by large the most part of the used API in Windows has been stable not since Win95, but since Windows NT 3.1.
All those updates that you mention, yes, they are useful, and yes, they are being used, and no, they *aren't* that needeful, because everybody and their wife test on freshly installed Win95.
As for MFCxx.dll, that is an abstraction library that builds *on* Win32 API.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
All those updates that you mention, yes, they are useful, and yes, they are being used, and no, they *aren't* that needeful, because everybody and their wife test on freshly installed Win95.
Err, what crack have you been smoking?
Take ADO for arguments sake. ADO (ActiveX data objects) is a com based library for accessing all types of databases. Back in Win 95, ADO did not even exist, it was DAO. (think access centric)
100% of applications released in the last 2-3 years will rely on ADO 2.x
ADO is part of the MDAC package (Microsoft data access components), so unless you can install MDAC on said WINE machine, there is no way that an app that is linked to ADO is going to run!
What, slashdot would link to any arrogant asshole's interview only because his opinion is unpopular? And why is he answering to comments here in the form of "interview"? Can't he just umm... write comments here like we do, and be flamed in a regular course of things?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I think his position stems from the fact that we coders out there love to rewrite things on a whim. Often times we as coders like to work with pristine code, and we find ugly code offensive (even if the ugly code works). However, his take is that unless you can show that the cost of rewriting outweighs the benefit, you should leave the code alone.
In most cases when you have a piece of working code that does the job, the cost of rewriting it from scratch is very VERY high (higher than we coders think). Therefore, you should think long and hard before going down that path.
At the first company I worked at out of school (a large financial institution), I had the misfortune of working on a large, monolithic FORTRAN app. This app was one of the worst messes I have ever seen. It was originally written by a financial guru who knew just enough about programming to be dangerous. In time, many programmers had come and gone and added their own bug fixes and feature to the code. By the time I had gotten to it, it was a bear to make changes to. My first thought was that this app should be rewriting from the ground up. In fact, I started working on a project to replace the app. After a few weeks I came to the realization that rewriting the app was a waste of time.
The fact is that old FORTRAN app worked! To create an new app that would completely mimic the old thing would take many, many man-years. Sure modifications to the old app were a pain. However, it took less time to make the modifications to the old app than it would take for me to rewrite the whole thing.
In the end I put aside my snobbish attitude and learned a little FORTRAN!
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
Refactoring has nothing to do with adding features or eliminating bugs. If you are doing either of those things, what you are doing is not refactoring. Refactoring is rearranging the internals of your code to eliminate duplication and increase modularity, without changing existing behaviour at all.
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CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
So, the new M$ OS is not as backwards compatible as they say? No Way! I would not believe it if it were not true at each "upgrade".
As this is true, why do so many people cling to the insecure, ineficient and ugly "products" M$ keeps reselling? Joel can sit around and justify MicroSoft's ugly junk all day long. The free world has run circles around his increasingly irrelavant dinosaur, rewriting everything from the ground up multiple times AND making good use of shared and reusable code. M$ has been so busy advertising, squashing the "competitors" who made their platform useful to begin with, and building "security" for pimpy music publishers and their own goofey office suite that their core software looks terribly ancient. What is left to differentiate thier junk from the rest of the world's software but the ease of monopoly forced preloads, and access to closed hardware interfaces that gaurantee your current computer will break in two years and the hardware will not work it's replacement? Phthththtt!
Enough time wasting here, that article on Maryland's county wide LAN for everyone looks like much more fun. I wonder if they run a Debian mirror on it yet...
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You can install MDAC on Win95, therefor, you don't need to copy MDAC functionality, only 95 functionality, and then just install MDAC!
That is the point I'm trying to make, once you got the common base, you can start expending, but there are glaring holes in WINE that has been there for a long time.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
"What he's saying is 'If I'm working on Foo.bar, and it's got 10 functions, if I'm in function 1, I might notice a better way to do what function 1 does, so I implement it. Better program.'
Actually, I did a search on the text, and he doesn't say that anywhere. You mean that what you choose to interpret his words to mean is
He talks about the folly about recoding from the ground up. It's a matter of scale. He
His argument is easily defeated. If I have a 10,000 line uncommented buggy program in an obsolete language that does something I can pull of in C with a single function call
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
He advocates incremental fixes as they seem appropriate, as opposed to throwing out all previous work and starting from scratch as the 'this will fix everything' solution.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Interviewer: Slashdot, as you know, is a citadel of Linux True Believers...However, to date, as a desktop OS and competitor to Windows, it's been a bust.
The interview prefaces with a description about the last time their site was mentioned on Slashdot:
Visits to www.softwaremarketsolution.com shot to 40K page views in a single day and in turn generated a lively new thread on Slashdot about the ideas and viewpoints expressed in the interview.
And they're arguing against Linux on the desktop?!?
The success of Slashdot is directly related to the success of Linux on the desktop. Yes, there are Windows using readers, and god knows even I've tried reading it with Lynx, but by and large, Slashdot is the end users of Linux.