You're kidding, right? A lot more projects get made than those programmers
would make on their own - the people who pay programmers decide...
where do you work? A bank using COBOL? At high tech companies, the programmers do what they want. Yep, they're influenced by the product requirements so we see a lot of Windows, but they use C++ over C when they want to, and they use the development environment they want to, jumping to Wizard C and then Borland when it made sense, not slaves at all to Microsoft. Now we're seeing lots of Java, and even at COBOL houses. Microsoft has used its monopoly position to strangle its competition so there aren't many robust choices today, but when you look at (as I mentioned) future hardware platforms, handhelds, single chip, whatever, developers will choose what they want, and as we are seeing, it isn't turning out Windows.
I'm not encouraging anyone to linux, BTW. I'm just giving Windows drones a glimpse of what they will be using when they're Linux drones.
I agree, he does make some good points... but they don't prove his point,
Userbase is king. Windows has the userbase. If Linux doesn't get a big
userbase, then people won't develop there.
certainly, marketsize influences people downstream, but it's also true that in a high growth industry there are more buyers in the future than there are in the market at the moment, According to his logic, the PC would never have taken over from the Apple II, etc. Linux is here today, and it wasn't yesterday. That calls for explanation, not dismissal.
There are a lot of commercial developers that grew up using Microsoft
code generators. Those people will be the last to switch to *NIX.
... so? what's your point? Hoping they remember to shut the last windows machines off?
For a lot of smaller developers (database developers, etc) the fastest way
to do something is still use generation tools... Those developer's won't switch until a similar body of apps are available
on Linux
Oh gee! I don't have an answer to this!!! Oh wait, you answered it yourself:
- Any tool you can use in [NT], you can use in [*NIX].
What
version of glibc? What version of X? You don't have these kinds of problems
with Windows, mainly because MS forces people to stay on an upgrade path,
They must have really good crack on his planet! due to the way Windows centralizes the installation stuff, you frequently need to reinstall the whole OS when you screw up or install a piece of screwed up software. (Admit it: especially when you help your friends and relatives)
... page of CLI commands. Compare this to Visual Studio's, where you pop the
CD, pick which options you want, and then go away while it installs.
... but once it installs, don't go anywhere: you can't do unattended builds when you need to click buttons in a GUI to get the source code, build it, etc. Oh, the perils of a CLI!
But, as easy as it was to refute most of his points, or at least show the other side of the same coin, none of it's important. The most influential people make decisions for the masses, so it does not matter what the masses expect. Look at the Computer Science labs of all of the top CS universities (MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc.) You will see more unix and linux than Windows, and if you talk to people they can articulate 1000s of reasons why. Even if they work on more advanced or experimental OSs or environments, chances are they do their work from Unix. They respect it. Nobody with credentials respects Windows.
Re:Programmers who enjoy coding so much...
on
A Praise To Unix
·
· Score: 1
for a Brazilian (or any f'rner), your English is awfully good:) "history making" is "historic", rather than "historical". "coding" is a slightly more old-fashioned word for programmer, from the days days when things were hand-coded.
I hadn't recalled that the Cons went back to 1975, but that was all wirewrapped, no? I was thinking of the "on-a-chip" VLSI variety. Apologies. the unix LISP, muLisp, was purely interpreted, I believe.
But back to the topic at hand, as beautiful as Lisp is, it is not catching on with the programming masses and probably never will. Linux seriously is, and I just get annoyed hearing people criticize Linux because of the Desktops they've seen. That's not what Linux is about, and if people focus on it they'll miss the big picture: Linux will supplant Windows for reasons that have naught to do with GUIs.
Re:Programmers who enjoy coding so much...
on
A Praise To Unix
·
· Score: 1
Slimebolics "historical" Lisp Machine? I learned (and loved!) Lisp (on a unix machine:) before any hardware Lisp Machine ever existed.
That's why I quoted "historical"... but in all my days I've never seen any coder quoting "coding", as you did.
I just spent writing a beautifully worded refutation of your post, but a Netscape-on-Windows browser crash swallowed my preview... too tired to write it again, but your post missed my point entirely: that's the just doesn't get it part.
What you wrote, each point, over and over, would suggest that linux should never have happened... but it did. What is needed on your side is a theory that explains both the historical phenomenon and shows it tailing off in the future.
hehe... i'm quite aware that the large servers kept going with UNIX/VAX/etc.
you will probably say you are aware of this too, but what has traditionally been called a "workstation" is a single-user, personal computer, that runs unix, and they've existed as long as Sun has, and that's pretty much the whole time the PC has existed. Many of the people who developed the original PCs were well aware of existence of multi-user and multi-tasking, but to a combination of
incredible shortsightedness
saving a nickel here and there on hardware and on software
and perhaps not to cannibalize larger systems
they quite consciously chose not to include these features in the desktop PC.
In the higher-end workstation market, they smartly embraced "real" operating systems, but in their zeal to chase complex architectures for extremely high performance, they ignored the (completely obvious to corporate strategists) eventual threat from ever improving Wintel chips and software.
Linux represents the opportunity for the great software to wrest the best (price/performance) hardware back.
people who talk about linux and unix as a user-platform, comparing it to the Windows user experience or the Mac user experience just don't get it: Unix and now especially linux are programmers' operating systems, designed and built for programmers. Programmers who enjoy coding so much that they'll do it for free like to use unix, and not Windows.
People who poo-poo the potential that linux has need to remember two things:
in the future, they'll get what the programmers give them. that's the nature of software. if the programmers choose linux (for handhelds, etc.), then that's what users will be using.
don't believe me? in the past, they never predicted where linux would be today, so that's why we're not listening. and I, as my friends will tell you, was predicting exactly what has happened, and I was predicting it five years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding, right? A lot more projects get made than those programmers would make on their own - the people who pay programmers decide...
where do you work? A bank using COBOL? At high tech companies, the programmers do what they want. Yep, they're influenced by the product requirements so we see a lot of Windows, but they use C++ over C when they want to, and they use the development environment they want to, jumping to Wizard C and then Borland when it made sense, not slaves at all to Microsoft. Now we're seeing lots of Java, and even at COBOL houses. Microsoft has used its monopoly position to strangle its competition so there aren't many robust choices today, but when you look at (as I mentioned) future hardware platforms, handhelds, single chip, whatever, developers will choose what they want, and as we are seeing, it isn't turning out Windows.
I'm not encouraging anyone to linux, BTW. I'm just giving Windows drones a glimpse of what they will be using when they're Linux drones.
I agree, he does make some good points... but they don't prove his point,
Userbase is king. Windows has the userbase. If Linux doesn't get a big userbase, then people won't develop there.
certainly, marketsize influences people downstream, but it's also true that in a high growth industry there are more buyers in the future than there are in the market at the moment, According to his logic, the PC would never have taken over from the Apple II, etc. Linux is here today, and it wasn't yesterday. That calls for explanation, not dismissal.
There are a lot of commercial developers that grew up using Microsoft code generators. Those people will be the last to switch to *NIX.
... so? what's your point? Hoping they remember to shut the last windows machines off?
For a lot of smaller developers (database developers, etc) the fastest way to do something is still use generation tools... Those developer's won't switch until a similar body of apps are available on Linux
Oh gee! I don't have an answer to this!!! Oh wait, you answered it yourself:
- Any tool you can use in [NT], you can use in [*NIX].
What version of glibc? What version of X? You don't have these kinds of problems with Windows, mainly because MS forces people to stay on an upgrade path,
They must have really good crack on his planet! due to the way Windows centralizes the installation stuff, you frequently need to reinstall the whole OS when you screw up or install a piece of screwed up software. (Admit it: especially when you help your friends and relatives)
... but once it installs, don't go anywhere: you can't do unattended builds when you need to click buttons in a GUI to get the source code, build it, etc. Oh, the perils of a CLI!
But, as easy as it was to refute most of his points, or at least show the other side of the same coin, none of it's important. The most influential people make decisions for the masses, so it does not matter what the masses expect. Look at the Computer Science labs of all of the top CS universities (MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc.) You will see more unix and linux than Windows, and if you talk to people they can articulate 1000s of reasons why. Even if they work on more advanced or experimental OSs or environments, chances are they do their work from Unix. They respect it. Nobody with credentials respects Windows.
I hadn't recalled that the Cons went back to 1975, but that was all wirewrapped, no? I was thinking of the "on-a-chip" VLSI variety. Apologies. the unix LISP, muLisp, was purely interpreted, I believe.
But back to the topic at hand, as beautiful as Lisp is, it is not catching on with the programming masses and probably never will. Linux seriously is, and I just get annoyed hearing people criticize Linux because of the Desktops they've seen. That's not what Linux is about, and if people focus on it they'll miss the big picture: Linux will supplant Windows for reasons that have naught to do with GUIs.
Slimebolics "historical" Lisp Machine? I learned (and loved!) Lisp (on a unix machine :) before any hardware Lisp Machine ever existed.
That's why I quoted "historical" ... but in all my days I've never seen any coder quoting "coding", as you did.
What you wrote, each point, over and over, would suggest that linux should never have happened... but it did. What is needed on your side is a theory that explains both the historical phenomenon and shows it tailing off in the future.
hehe... i'm quite aware that the large servers kept going with UNIX/VAX/etc.
you will probably say you are aware of this too, but what has traditionally been called a "workstation" is a single-user, personal computer, that runs unix, and they've existed as long as Sun has, and that's pretty much the whole time the PC has existed. Many of the people who developed the original PCs were well aware of existence of multi-user and multi-tasking, but to a combination of
- incredible shortsightedness
- saving a nickel here and there on hardware and on software
- and perhaps not to cannibalize larger systems
they quite consciously chose not to include these features in the desktop PC.In the higher-end workstation market, they smartly embraced "real" operating systems, but in their zeal to chase complex architectures for extremely high performance, they ignored the (completely obvious to corporate strategists) eventual threat from ever improving Wintel chips and software.
Linux represents the opportunity for the great software to wrest the best (price/performance) hardware back.
People who poo-poo the potential that linux has need to remember two things: