Look back in sorrow. Modern tech's cool, but many things used to be so very much better than now.

[liam_on_linux]

I love my Android phone in some ways - what it can do is wonderful. The formfactor of my Nokia E90 was better in every single way, though. Give the Nokia a modern CPU, replace its silly headphone socket, MiniUSB port & Nokia charging port with a standard jack & a MicroUSB, make the internal screen a touchscreen, and I would take your arm off in my

Comments

[uon]

O tempora o mores!

Worse is better.

--
Sent from my iPhone

[liam_on_linux]

"Worse is better". Ain't that the truth. That is the core of it all, indeed. That comment, that talk, that mindset.

I'm still not convinced.

[uon]

Convinced about what? To quote from Richard Gabriel's essay:

However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach
..that is to say: it doesn't matter what you, or anyone, thinks is good or bad. It doesn't matter how "good" or "bad" a given design of software or hardware is; what determines whether or not it's around in a decade or four are its survival characteristics, which are a very different sort of thing. Your optic nerve is plugged in backwards, in an unbelievably stupid manner that results in you having a blind spot in each eye, but it just so happens that evolutionarily this isn't such a big deal. Intel CPUs or TCP/IP or UNIX are all ugly as sin in some ways, but they just happened to do the right things for the right people at the right time. Look on the bright side: at least the popular smartphone OSes are unix derivatives rather than zombie grandchildren

[liam_on_linux]

I think that this, #83 I think, is the most insightful comment of the whole lot. (Sorry Geoff, Richard

[uon]

I'm not sure I see how a workstation with an OS written in a language that Liam understands would be of immense use to others. What's wrong with C, as long as you've got the source code? Would you really feel more comfortable working with a complex system written in LISP than one written in ANSI C? I hear the GNOME folks are moving to Javascript, so your dream may come true anyway

[liam_on_linux]

I realise that this is not going to go down well, but

[uon]

Choosing a different language will not reduce your misery: it will, at best, postpone it

[liam_on_linux]

Yes, I do understand that.

It is possibly worth reiterating that I am in a way looking in at this from the outside, as it were. My meagre knowledge of linguistics exceeds my almost-homeopathic knowledge of programming.

Let me try to express one of my thoughts another way. I ran it up against an entirely different one in my previous post (that different thought being my grave reservations about C and its immediate family).

I used to program. I enjoyed it. I wasn't very good at it, but at a recreational level, I found it fun. When I first tried doing it for work purposes, it put me right off. I mentioned this on Twitter recently. (Not sure if that link will open the conversation in its entirety

[liam_on_linux]

Now the thing is this. From group 2 on down, these people mostly, I suspect - and of course this is all generalisations, mostly quite sweeping here - have little clear conception of the higher levels and the stuff that the higher levels discuss and deal in. The ideas that group 1 toss about casually, if group 2 hear of them, seem like discussing the comparative virtues of Classical Greek and Vulgar Latin

[liam_on_linux]

Now this being so - which is guesswork on my part, but based on observation - then it raises a question in my mind

[andrewducker]

If you want a 21C Delphi then you want the language the Delphi creator did next. Which was C#.

Which I love to bits. And does a great job (in later versions) of taking powerful tools from other languages and bolting them on in a nicely fluent manner (including such things as closures, but in a way that didn't require my brain to become twice as large to deal with them).

But the thing is - there is no "best" language. Many different languages have advantages and disadvantages. My brother is writing an iPhone game at the moment, and he's had to abandon Objective-C to go back to C++, because he needs to be closer to "the metal" to get the speed he needs. If you don't need that speed then you can use languages that are more easily understood. And if you're lucky, you can find a language which allows you to use a mixture of approaches, depending on what you need a particular application to do.

[geoffcampbell]

Well, he's saying exactly what I have been saying from the start, so apology accepted, thanks.

GJC

[geoffcampbell]

Hear, hear!

GJC