Re: Object Rexx to become Open Source
From: Gerry Hickman (gerry666uk_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 10/25/04
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Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:08:18 +0100
Hi Al,
>>>an issue in which one almost religiously believes in the absolute right
> Understood and agreed - I guess the issue with me is that the style of
> argument tends to make it seem primarily an emotional one for you rather
> than a rational one. That is no skin off my nose, I just point out that one
> tends to lose some credibility by this technique.
I don't think this is a fair comment; I'll explain why. You imply that
my comments are based on a "religious belief". But as we all know, the
whole basis of religion is "declaring something as fact which cannot be
proved" and "having blind faith in a concept which has no scientific
value". In contrast to this, my comments were laid out in a scientific
way with side by side examples, and therefore I don't think "religion"
is a good yard stick by which to judge this. I do agree about the
emotional side and the artistic side though.
>>then tell me what happened to "Visual Basic" and VBA??
>
> They are not the only programming platforms that have disappeared or become
> less prevalent for various reasons. In addition to your viewpoints on why
> this is so for VB and VBA,
Well I think we all know the reasons - Microsoft was losing credibility
in the toy-town world of VB*, and had to come up with something a little
more grown-up. Hence the birth of C# (a direct rip-off of JScript).
Overnight, people switched from Delphi in droves. Of course we still
have VB.NET, but to me it's lost what VB was supposed to be all about.
> No you can't, yet I'm not sure that that is a disadvantage for someone who
> has not used that feature. In any case, the ?*...*? technique is one that
> requires some self-discipline,
After doing some VBScript coding at the weekend, it's reinforced my view
that this is a sad omission from VBScript. It's really useful to be able
to block out chunks of code while testing, and multiline comments are
really handy for documentation. Your tip about using 'if false' blocks
is a good one, but it's hardly intuitive when you're reading back pages
and pages of code - it looks too much like other 'if' blocks whereas
/*...*/ is very clear as a comment.
>>Sounds good? But that's the day Microsoft's blinkered vision of the
>>world came crashing to a sudden halt, and everything about IE4, IE5 and
>>IE6 was all about how well it complied with "W3C this", and "ECMA that".
> You have somehow managed to neatly avoid answering my ("extremely good", to
> quote a reliable source!) question while at the same time seeming to answer
> it. You have the dual benefits of (apparently) a better language and one
> that is more standards-compliant on which to base your arguments. My
> question to you (not to Microsoft) was: were this not the case, would you go
> with an inferior language because it was standards-based, or would you
> flaunt standards to go with what you felt was a superior language? The world
> awaits your answer, as, regardless what you say, it will weaken *one* of
> your two anti-vbscript arguments.
I felt I did answer it with my example. The point being that there are
lots of aspects to the WWW that would be a lot "easier" and "better"
with the proprietary "SuperWeb" concept I outlined earlier. But no one
in their right mind would choose this over the yummy
"courier-fonted-closely-typed" specifications of the W3C and the ECMA!
Not even Microsoft, and certainly not me. Open standards and open-source
are the key to the future.
Another example is Microsoft's RDS, arguably better than open-standards
SOAP, but where is RDS now?
> As an interesting side-note, a new colleague of mine asked me earlier this
> week whether or not he would be out of line to make a presentation on a few
> possible uses of open source in our organization at an upcoming meeting.
> Having encouraged him to do so, I am looking forward to an interesting
> discussion. Whether or not it will fly at all in our strictly (MS)
> standards-based organization is perhaps a moot point, but avoiding such
> discussion altogether when the opportunity arises wouldn't be healthy.
Let us know if you see anything interesting. One of the main problems
will be interop - nearly everything designed by Microsoft is designed to
only work with other Microsoft kit. There was recent talk of opening up
SMB to better interoperate with Sun MicroSystems servers. I personally
view this as a PR stunt, I'll give it to v1.5 before Microsoft declare
"We changed our minds, WinFS is the new holy grail". The bottom line is
that enterprise IT is really simple when you strip it down, the
complexity is caused by corporate interests trying to lock people into a
proprietary technology. Open source allows that vicious circle to be broken.
-- Gerry Hickman (London UK)
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