Sometimes, you get what you need

[deflatermouse]

Someone sent me a link to this post entitled "Desktop Linux suckage: where's our Steve Jobs?" and it tickled something in my booze shattered brain. Actually, it tickled three thoughts. Sometimes I wonder if my brain works entirely in parallel because it tends to operate as either off or a screaming cascade of constantly collapsing and expanding

Comments

[deflatermouse]

Well, a couple of answers to that.

First, I should have really picked KOffice rather than OpenOffice.

Secondly - yeah, it sucks and it's derivative but so was Linux 0.1. My point was that OpenSource keeps getting better. And sometimes it ends up with stuff that's better than commercial software.

The big question is whether it can get into a habit of innovating rather than imitating.

You still in Oakland? Where you working nowadays?

[deflatermouse]

Also, OpenOffice is OpenSource now which means, (if you squint at it in the right way) that the open source movement caused it to end up open source and thus, directly or indirectly we end up with an open source Office Suite.

Sort of. Maybe.

That argument's a bit shit though.

[zimpenfish]

"When the Gnu project started up people said that it couldn't do more than replace Unix utilities. Then there was emacs"

Emacs: mid-1970s
The Gnu Project: 1983

Your implied timeline is backwards.

I would also like to second revmischa: "people said "Well, fine but you can't produce enterprise class Desktop apps" and then OpenOffice got made" -- to prove them 100% correct. OpenOffice is to enterprise class Desktop apps what Dan Brown is to quality literature.

[deflatermouse]

Err, yeah. You've got me there.

[perlmonger]

generating a verbose, textual markup language by concatenating strings together

Wash your mouth out! Even the entrails of that monstrous abortion, the pre-IE8 MS DOM¹, don't need that. Mostly. Not hereabouts, anyhow.

As revmischa writes, I'm not sure how much OpenOffice counts in your argument, given its origins in StarOffice and Sun; a better example of complex SL user apps might be the Gimp, which against all odds succeeds in its wildly ambitious target of making Photoshop look user friendly.

¹ Did you know, BTW, that IE7 barfs with an error spurious in both text and indicated location if a reference to a function the source of which contains a double quote character even in a comment is included in a hash or array denotation? You couldn't, as they say, make it up.

[deflatermouse]

Wash your mouth out! Even the entrails of that monstrous abortion, the pre-IE8 MS DOM¹, don't need that. Mostly. Not hereabouts, anyhow.

True, you don't need to do that any more now but you used to have to.

Also, as someone else pointed out

you clearly don't do much web app programming anymore. Take [fairly well known site] for example. The back-end is ruby. Fair enough. The front end is HTML written by RHTML templates with embedded Ruby, also embedding JavaScript, and (recently, experimentally) using the nginx renderer include functions to parallelize some rendering.

That's _5_ front-end languages. Maybe 4 if you disagree that HTML is a languge.

[perlmonger]

It's… eclectic…

For various reasons, we use ColdFusion server-end, so that's three languages (CFML, CFScript and Java) straight out. With a fair wodge of Perl as well, Javascript and HTML client side, plus a few pidgins for specialised purposes. If you really wanted, you could call CSS a functional language too.

Miracle any of it works at all, let alone as well as it actually does.

[pfig]

i was going to reply, but then the words "free software foundation" formed inside my head and all i can say is "COCK".