Comments | tim_maroney: up-mod of the day

tim_maroney

up-mod of the day

Jun 29, 2003 17:52

For some reason I'm always pleased to get modded up to 5 on /.. Since I'm no fan of open source software in general, taking the fight to the beast's lair and emerging victorious is very rewarding -- much like, say, being scorned for years as a crackpot firebrand, sticking to my guns, and finding my perspectives and ideas on the lips of the next ( Read more... )

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Getting modded up maxomai June 29 2003, 18:12:06 UTC

The first time I got modded up to five it felt great.

These days it's just kinda, "eh, that's interesting."

People who don't like OSS or GPL are more common on Slashdot these days, precisely because it *is* the Lion's Den.

NB: I'd probably have agreed more with your comment five years ago. These days, I see a lot of relatively computer-illiterate or computer-apathetic people using Linux machines all the time, particularly in cyber-cafes around Portland. Most people use it for (1) Internet and (2) office stuff, and to those ends it works perfectly well once the machine is properly configured. Getting it to that point *is* harder with (for example) Debian than with, say, WinXP, but people in cybercafes (and high schools, and offices, etc.) usually don't have to touch the dirty installation-and-maintenance part of it at all.

Re: Getting modded up tim_maroney June 29 2003, 18:30:24 UTC

Things have improved somewhat on the open source usability front, but there's a long way to go. I've seen people announcing that Linux was just as friendly as Windows or the Mac for something like six years now, and back then the systems were not even remotely comparable. Linux Pollyannas are prone to admit that, all right, last year's version was pretty egregious, but now, everything really is just as good for the average user, honest. This cycle is repeated for the next release. OK, sure, you had to know Postscript and driver internals to set up a printer for the last version, but now it usually recognizes your printer. Oh, you want to add and share a new hard disc too? Um, well, that's for experts, not for lusers, but OK, OK, we'll try to make that better too ( ... )

Re: Getting modded up phygelus June 30 2003, 01:32:53 UTC

Linux is much more friendly than Windows or older Macs (I haven't used a Mac regularly since OS 8) if say, your goal is to run an awk script on tab-delimited data.

How come macro and scripting systems for modern applications are so much more difficult to use for automating nontrivial tasks than batch files and shell scripts?

Re: Getting modded up tim_maroney June 30 2003, 11:25:48 UTC

Funny that I never have a need to run awk scripts on tab-delimited data. If I did, though, I could always just run it from tcsh on Mac OS X. I think the UNIX paradigm creates requirements of this type that only it can satisfy well, so you may be giving it credit for solving problems it made itself.

The reason that scripting is more difficult on GUIs comes down to one simple fact: the application developers have chosen not to adopt it in any sensible form, when they adopt it at all. The architecture created for Apple events and AppleScript by my good friend Kurt Piersol some twelve years ago is perfectly sound and very powerful, but app developers have shunned it, even after Microsoft took it and bent it slightly into OSA. (And I'm definitely not letting my current employer off the hook here -- they're one of the worst offenders.)

Re: Getting modded up phygelus June 30 2003, 21:55:14 UTC

Funny that I never have a need to run awk scripts on tab-delimited data.

FUNNY INDEED.

If I did, though, I could always just run it from tcsh on Mac OS X.

THE POWER OF UNIX UNLEASHED!!!

mumble mumble sleep deprivation unix mumble how come no one makes a fortran interpreter? phygelus June 30 2003, 22:15:25 UTC

I think the UNIX paradigm creates requirements of this type that only it can satisfy well, so you may be giving it credit for solving problems it made itself.Seriously, though, the fact that unix and similar systems make it hard to deal with anything that's not a flat file (ergo est Oracle) actually does have its advantages: give me the the wasted space and other problems of a pile of numbers in tab-delimited ascii over scaring up some 15-year-old library to parse a binary file format any day ( ... )

Re: mumble mumble sleep deprivation unix mumble how come no one makes a fortran interpreter? tim_maroney June 30 2003, 22:51:45 UTC

Seriously, though, the fact that unix and similar systems make it hard to deal with anything that's not a flat file (ergo est Oracle) actually does have its advantages: give me the the wasted space and other problems of a pile of numbers in tab-delimited ascii over scaring up some 15-year-old library to parse a binary file format any day.

I don't think the wasted space matters much today. However, I think that the penetrability of obsolete text formats is overrated, unless one sticks to a very simple feature set. Just following links/pointers in someone else's unrolled text data stream can be a significant project.

Of course, now that we're all using XML, no one will ever have data migration problems again.Hee hee. Right now it's still an odd-man-out import/export format for most applications. Integration of XML into native programming control flows has proven more difficult than most people expected. Even a simple but critical thing like full round-tripping is often a V3 feature at best. So for today's software, you'd still be ( ... )

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