I'm a Relic
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001i found an old receipt for a laptop and memory expansion i bought in chicago in 1994 the laptop had a p75 ... 8mb ram ... 1mb vram ... 100mb hdd ... 640x480 screen ... cdrom and cost $5100 i added a pcmcia 28.8 modem for $295 and (wait for it) 16mb of memory for... $1095 and i sit and type this on a centrino duo with 2gb ram 80gb hdd 1680x1050 screen with dvdrw and wireless g that cost sub $2000 back then i was excited by this stuff and learning mfc and win95 programming *sigh*
"there is no spoon"
{some projects} {about me} -
I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Look... John don't sweat this stuff okay. Wait about 10 more years for all the baby boomers to totally retire (baby boomers = people who had a clue) and then your hayday will come back in full color and you'll be earning $150 an hour because there simply won't be anyone around who knows this stuff and you can name your price. Don't laugh it's going to happen. There is going to be such a huge hole left by retiring boomers that it's going to be a gold mine for forward thinkers who prepare for it about 2 years before it becomes pandemic.
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
We were a curious mix of wizards and gods
Hey John, we still are! However, someone just put all the ancient spells in a book and sells it along with a magic wand and usually a lot of so called programmers are simply very handy with the magic wand. Finding a compiler bug that trashes the call stack if multiple calls were made with pointers as argument, requires the old "wizards and gods" I think (actually that was an early release of a C-compiler for PIC17C675). I haven't seen a spell for that one in the book of spells. What bothers me is that there seems to be no "need" for the old school because now we simply wave the magic wand and all should work like a charm, usually... I don't like the idea that a handful of guys in Redmond are the only ones that really knows what's going on underneath all framework stuff, point net, C-sharp, C-dull and F-razor. Call me an evolution reluctant dinosaur! -- Rog
"It's supposed to be hard, otherwise anybody could do it!" - selfquote
"No one remembers a coward!" - Jan Elfström 1998
"...but everyone remembers an idiot!" - my lawyer 2005 when heard of Jan's saying above -
Ahhh memories - my brain was playing the "Way We Were" song while I was reading that. I miss the good ol' days, where I had every keyboard command of microsoft's M.exe editor memorized. I don't even take the time to learn keyboard short cuts, these days.
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
Steve Echols wrote:
microsoft's M.exe editor
I still remember Edlin. Hey!! My fingers also remembers how to type it fast enough! :laugh:
"It's supposed to be hard, otherwise anybody could do it!" - selfquote
"No one remembers a coward!" - Jan Elfström 1998
"...but everyone remembers an idiot!" - my lawyer 2005 when heard of Jan's saying above -
I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Well said, and definately deserving of the 5 vote. :) Whoever decided a web browser is the perfect platform for mission critical applications is smoking some serious juju... I mean, hell, I write ASP.NET. There are some things that work well in a browser. Database reporting, trouble ticket systems, and such. But a web-based Word clone has the security-minded part of me squeeming. I could maybe see it on an Intranet, but out in the wild? Eep! Aside from the fact that it's dog slow on dial-up.... Flynn -- I know, everyone has broadband these days. Methinks I'm a relic as well, heh.
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Steve Echols wrote:
microsoft's M.exe editor
I still remember Edlin. Hey!! My fingers also remembers how to type it fast enough! :laugh:
"It's supposed to be hard, otherwise anybody could do it!" - selfquote
"No one remembers a coward!" - Jan Elfström 1998
"...but everyone remembers an idiot!" - my lawyer 2005 when heard of Jan's saying aboveI think I had a batch file, like e.bat for quick access to edlin. :) ^Z
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
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Look... John don't sweat this stuff okay. Wait about 10 more years for all the baby boomers to totally retire (baby boomers = people who had a clue) and then your hayday will come back in full color and you'll be earning $150 an hour because there simply won't be anyone around who knows this stuff and you can name your price. Don't laugh it's going to happen. There is going to be such a huge hole left by retiring boomers that it's going to be a gold mine for forward thinkers who prepare for it about 2 years before it becomes pandemic.
code-frog wrote:
baby boomers to totally retire
problem is, he's a baby boomer himself. LOL
Silence is the voice of complicity. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. -- monty python Might I suggest that the universe was always the size of the cosmos. It is just that at one point the cosmos was the size of a marble. -- Colin Angus Mackay
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
Me too. :) Maybe we can sell ourselves to the Smithsonian. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh Smith -
Yep, we're the old dogs now. Personally, I think being an old dog rocks. Wouldn't go back to being 20 again for love or money. And yet, there are things that have changed in the "me 2" world of programming that I could certainly live without. Whoever decided that HTML was a valid basis for application programming should be taken outside and summarily executed, in an exceedingly slow and clumsy manner so as to be a fitting punishment. If we have to write software using a clumsy word processor as a platform, then I'm glad we have VS and .NET. At least it almost feels like programming again. However, the :baaaa!: mentality of this business just astounds me. We have a worldwide TCP/IP network. Why in heaven's name aren't we using a more powerful platform for development then a markup language that's less sexy than WordStar? Arf.
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
less sexy than WordStar
Hey now. I wrote a ton of documentation for the USAF using WordStar. :-D
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Yep, we're the old dogs now. Personally, I think being an old dog rocks. Wouldn't go back to being 20 again for love or money. And yet, there are things that have changed in the "me 2" world of programming that I could certainly live without. Whoever decided that HTML was a valid basis for application programming should be taken outside and summarily executed, in an exceedingly slow and clumsy manner so as to be a fitting punishment. If we have to write software using a clumsy word processor as a platform, then I'm glad we have VS and .NET. At least it almost feels like programming again. However, the :baaaa!: mentality of this business just astounds me. We have a worldwide TCP/IP network. Why in heaven's name aren't we using a more powerful platform for development then a markup language that's less sexy than WordStar? Arf.
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Whoever decided that HTML was a valid basis for application programming should be taken outside and summarily executed, in an exceedingly slow and clumsy manner so as to be a fitting punishment
Can we really do this? I will contribute to start a search for the first one who took that unspeakable action!!! I do think that we need to work more on that punishment though.
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
extended and expanded memory
oh the memories! :rolleyes:
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
Linkify! || Fold With Us! || sighist -
I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
.NET has given me a lot more power and flexibilty. The kind of stuff I've always dreamed about having. But as far as all this web-based stuff goes, I feel like a relic too. To me, the web apps UI are clumsy and no where near rich enough to do the kind of interfaces I require. (Okay, you can get some good UI's but usually with 300% more work than a standard desktop app) I can see that web-services are a useful, but only when used with desktop client applications. The rest of this Web 2.0 malarky leaves me cold.
Michael CP Blog [^] Development Blog [^]
Michael P Butler wrote:
but only when used with desktop client applications
What about one website requesting data from another using web-services? That is very useful.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you
eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Young man, I'll have you know that I was writing multi-user applications on a 64K machine running off twin 8-inch floppies... when MS-Dos was just a gleam in a pimply adolescent's eye... (cue Marty Feldman ... working 29 hours a day for a ha'penny a lifetime... we used to live in shoebox in t'middle o't'road...)
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Yep, we're the old dogs now. Personally, I think being an old dog rocks. Wouldn't go back to being 20 again for love or money. And yet, there are things that have changed in the "me 2" world of programming that I could certainly live without. Whoever decided that HTML was a valid basis for application programming should be taken outside and summarily executed, in an exceedingly slow and clumsy manner so as to be a fitting punishment. If we have to write software using a clumsy word processor as a platform, then I'm glad we have VS and .NET. At least it almost feels like programming again. However, the :baaaa!: mentality of this business just astounds me. We have a worldwide TCP/IP network. Why in heaven's name aren't we using a more powerful platform for development then a markup language that's less sexy than WordStar? Arf.
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Why in heaven's name aren't we using a more powerful platform for development then a markup language that's less sexy than WordStar?
It isn't great and has plenty of problems but it works now unlike the other options which don't have enough penetration to be used. MS are trying to sort things out with XAML but I don't see that taking off as it is a one vendor solution and we have had one vendor solutions with huge penetration (Flash) and people still don't want to use it. HTML sort of works. It is here now. We should work towards improving it, not throwing it out and trying to replace it. I am actually really happy someone did start the ball rolling with HTML as an application programming. Look at all the innovation that has spawned from it.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you
eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
Why in heaven's name aren't we using a more powerful platform for development then a markup language that's less sexy than WordStar?
It isn't great and has plenty of problems but it works now unlike the other options which don't have enough penetration to be used. MS are trying to sort things out with XAML but I don't see that taking off as it is a one vendor solution and we have had one vendor solutions with huge penetration (Flash) and people still don't want to use it. HTML sort of works. It is here now. We should work towards improving it, not throwing it out and trying to replace it. I am actually really happy someone did start the ball rolling with HTML as an application programming. Look at all the innovation that has spawned from it.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you
eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.
Paul Watson wrote:
HTML sort of works. It is here now.
The same was true of DOS. HTML is a markup language to display and link static documents, and for that it does fine. It wasn't designed as a foundation to make the web browser a virtual operating system for application programming. Nonetheless, that's what it is these days. It's evolved, true. From a massively clumsy environment to just "mostly clumsy" (similar to Hitchhikers guide's classification of Earth :)). Client application programming (or system programming) in Windows offers an incredibly rich feature set and the tools for a much more elegant UI. Instead of leveraging this power and bolting on a global TCP/IP network, we're trying to make chicken salad out of, er, chicken droppings. True, the web is cross platform, and I think that's it's biggest benefit. However, what if we took the same approach to global standards, augmenting the web browser with another cross platform environment that actually was designed for programming and a UI and desktop experience? I'm telling you, there's a Killer App in here somewhere...
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
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I remember fondly the heyday of computer programmers. We were a curious mix of wizards and gods, silently tapping away at keyboards, shunning those new-fangled mouse things as long as possible. We were cowboys, outlaws, and warrior poets weaving titanic tales of bytes and opcodes, roaming the electronic frontier during the burgeoning era of personal computers, free to do as we pleased, and answering only to our peers. We could cram amazing amounts of code into just 4K of memory because we knew assembly language and we knew the value of just a single byte of memory. We fed off the tit of mother COBOL, and her evil cousin, Fortran, and we praised Pascal for it's type safety, and sheer elegance. We dabbled fearlessly in LISP, mastered the DOS commandline, knew the difference between extended and expanded memory, and decided early on that Windows was Hell incarnate. We taught ourselves C and then C++, still thinking tight and efficient code mattered to someone other than ourselves. We struggled to learn MFC's quirks and eventually began to fondly recall the exquisite and deft code used to circumvent the library's limitations, or as we put it, extend it's usefulness. And then came .Net and cookie-cutter applications. Suddenly we were thrust into the maelstrom of "me-too" programming, populated by 12-year olds who believe that the OS should be web-based, and that have no awareness nor respect for those who came before - those who could write 100,000 line programs from scratch with nothing more than a few hastily scratched verses on a post-it note. I'm a relic. I like the old days. I like the old ways. There. I've said it.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Yes! Just look for the 5 kilobytes Wolfenstein clone made in javascript and you will see relics still live in remote regions of the wild Earth.
---------- Siderite
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
Whoever decided that HTML was a valid basis for application programming should be taken outside and summarily executed, in an exceedingly slow and clumsy manner so as to be a fitting punishment
Can we really do this? I will contribute to start a search for the first one who took that unspeakable action!!! I do think that we need to work more on that punishment though.
Umm how about a clumsy environment with single dialog box for every field & devoid of any shortcuts, used for data entry. And abasing him by sentencing "Data Entry till death". A clue of such environment - Something like : 1. Enter the first name : ________ Then a question thereof. "Are you sure this is the first name?" If yes then 2. Enter the middle name : _______ Then again the similar question. "Are you sure this is the second name?" If yes then 3. Enter the last name : ________ And yes a question again.:-D This is a mere description of the Name Entry session. Next would be for Father's Name. Similarily for Address, Telephone Number, SSN and so on. The guilty would serve the world and pay for his deceit simultaneously :) How painful is that?
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WordStar, heh, heh, I remember the CPM/MPM days....
............................. There's nothing like the sound of incoming rifle and mortar rounds to cure the blues. No matter how down you are, you take an active and immediate interest in life. Fiat justitia, et ruat cælum
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Paul Watson wrote:
HTML sort of works. It is here now.
The same was true of DOS. HTML is a markup language to display and link static documents, and for that it does fine. It wasn't designed as a foundation to make the web browser a virtual operating system for application programming. Nonetheless, that's what it is these days. It's evolved, true. From a massively clumsy environment to just "mostly clumsy" (similar to Hitchhikers guide's classification of Earth :)). Client application programming (or system programming) in Windows offers an incredibly rich feature set and the tools for a much more elegant UI. Instead of leveraging this power and bolting on a global TCP/IP network, we're trying to make chicken salad out of, er, chicken droppings. True, the web is cross platform, and I think that's it's biggest benefit. However, what if we took the same approach to global standards, augmenting the web browser with another cross platform environment that actually was designed for programming and a UI and desktop experience? I'm telling you, there's a Killer App in here somewhere...
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
It isn't just cross platform, it is instantly deployable. No installation, no downloading files and running, no one click installers even. You just point your browser at an address and whatever that address wants to show you, it can. When it updates it updates. And if you have a browser most of the stuff out there just works. No extra downloads, no .NET Frameworks or operating system requirements. Sure, some sites need Flash (98% penetration) or Java (penetrated) and you get quirks between browsers but hardly ever show stopping. No firewall problems either, most firewalls are happy with :80. All of this can be improved by other systems and new software or browser plugins but those all start at a huge disadvantage; 0 penetration. Not just 0 penetration on target systems but 0 penetration in developers minds, in documentation, examples, hacks, workarounds, tutorials, lectures, conferences, tools, vendors, platforms etc. etc. etc. And whatever this Killer App is it has to be an open standard, it has to be easy to hack (HTML over HTTP is brilliantly easy to hack, it is just text. To me binary standards are dead in the water for hacking) and it needs to be uncomplicated. The attempted solutions have all been too complicated, overengineered. They solve everything including the edge cases but they make it difficult for the 99% of problems that aren't edge cases. We don't always need to be able to build a kitchen sink :)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you
eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.
