Symbian to Open Source OPL

simpl3x writes "Symbian is apparently going to open source their Basic-like development language used on the Psion platform. Here is a link via the Register. Interesting things seem to be happening in the mobile space, and although Psion had some very nice technology, they never seemed to get anywhere in the U.S. Any comments on developing for Psion, or Symbian for that matter? I am interested in the development environments people prefer."

Comments

I always wanted...

[itwerx]

...to be able to program my girlfriend's Sybian...

Re:I always wanted...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, she let me program her sybian last week. If you didn't notice, you really don't deserve to be her boyfriend.

Not that you matter anyways...

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

delightful machines

[Spudley]

Psion: The Amiga of handhelds.

That sums it up really; elegant design, way ahead of it's time, but poorly marketed (still sold pretty well in some quarters, tho), and now getting well and truly stomped on by the big M$ in the form of PocketPC (now that they've finally begun to catch up).

Very sad that another innovative product seems to be losing the fight. Psion discontinued their truly excellent Series 5 just as sales of PDAs were begining to accelerate. :-(

There is hope, though - Symbian is the reborn son so Psion, now selling the OS to any handheld manufacturer that's interested. I only hope the new company can maintain the vision and innovation of the original... and has better fortunes.

Re:delightful machines

[Malcolm Scott]

Hear, hear. The Series 5 was a great machine, and for me, the OPL language was one of its best points. The ability to quickly code something on-the-move is surprisingly useful.

Since Psion aren't actively developing OPL, I think that Symbian have done the Right Thing (tm) by open-sourcing it. That way, new life might come to those thousands of OPL programs Psion users have accumulated over the ages. Plus I think it's a great language for beginners - not as sloppy as BASIC, but almost as easy.

Will they get it?

[ciaran_o_riordan]

What are the chances they GPL the lot?

any guesses?
well, they're going to "Open Source" the software, and they are a "company", so my guess it they will invent their own stupid license and keep squashing down the corners until they can fit it past the OpenSourceInitiative license endorsment monkey.

Then they can join the ranks of the successful OpenSource companys, right up there with RealNetworks.

Heh heh, I rule.

Ciaran O'Riordan

OPL

[ralphclark]

Is this the language that started out as OPL on the on the original Psion Organiser handhelds? I had a Psion II, a brick-like thing with a 6Mhz CPU and a 2-line x 16-character mono alphanumeric display. I loved it to bits. When I left college it was the only computer I had but OPL was sophisticated enough for me to sharpen my coding skills on.

Programming this thing gave me my first experience of staying up all night "in the zone" then being shocked to hear birdsong and looking up to see the pre-dawn sky lightening through the window,

I remember writing a debugger, disassembler and reverse interpreter so I could debug programs for which the source had been wiped (you soon ran out of storage even with the 64K eprom memory pack, which you couldn't easily erase). I remember writing a blues melody generator (on the pathetic litle piezo speaker) to help me with guitar practice. And a little proglet that emitted an ultraonic whine to make the dog next door shut up whenever he started his interminable barking.

The first thing it taught me was the difference between theory and practice. The lecturers at college were heavily into data abstraction and functional programming (this was pre-OO) and that was great - but just try programming something recursive when you've only got 8K to play with and you soon learn the value of unrolling it into an iterative version before punching it in.

Hard to believe now but because of the limited hardware, for anything bigger than a few lines, I used to code up all my programs on a good old fashioned spiral bound notepad (easy to rip out a page if you need to rewrite a subroutine) and only key them in when I was sure I was near to getting a good compile. It was actually much quicker that way, and being forced to think things out like that rather than depending on trial & error made me a better programmer.

Good Old Psion Organizer II. Now lying unloved at the bottom of a dusty old drawer. Wouldn't do to be seen with it now!

Re:OPL

[melonman]

Good Old Psion Organizer II. Now lying unloved at the bottom of a dusty old drawer. Wouldn't do to be seen with it now!

It's probably still one of the most robust palmtops ever built. My brother once dropped his onto tarmac from the top of a Land Rover doing 40mph (I never did work out how...), and, apart from a crack in the glass in front of the lcd, it worked fine for the next couple of years. I wouldn't rate the chances of any modern PDA after such an adventure.

Might have to pick one up then...

[osPDAproject]

Oooh... Anything mentioning GPL and a handheld computer gets my attention. ^__^ *looks at username*