> > One hope for the decorporatisation of humanity is the collaborative
> > nature of the new Web. But it's going to take some time.
Next time you ride a bus, train, etc., anywhere the sky is
unobstructed, have a look at the teenagers - invariably they are
clutching their cell phones and typing SMS messages. When I first
started using email in the mid 1970s, I would have never dreamed that
only 30 years later, I would be able to use a hand held communicator
which would serve as a rudimentary computer and email client. Maybe
30 years was too long.
We APL programmers are mostly 50+ years old and don't matter much in
the grand scheme of things. And people in our age group who were not
computer literate matter less.
These people, however, do. Born in 1980 or later, starting off
adolescence using Windoze 95 or later, these are the primary users of
Internet services. Stuff which we may consider frivolous,
entertaining, or just plain useless, like YouTube, incessant blogging,
ICQ, and so on, is the normal modus operandi of people much younger
than we are.
In my meager opinion, Microsoft is the business model and product of
the 50+ crowd. Out to control the world, about the farthest thing
from democratic. IBM, Big Blue, was the hallmark of what a
corporation should be. Microsoft dethroned Big Blue and continues in
the same tradition. But it's only a matter of time until the
Microsoft software business model will be synonymous with film
developing, At least IBM still has its mainframes. Servers.
Linux and open source, however, is the business model and product of a
far more enlightened 30+ crowd. Democratic and meritocratic, and best
of all, anticorporate. The true Hacker Ethic - continuous evolution
and improvement for the sake of better quality and learning. None of
this execrable Vista or Office 2007 junk, upgrade for the sake of
expensive change. Or worthless patents, designed to extort.
I was very pleased to see that in my company, while Visual Studio (A
big M$ IDE) was deployed, Subversion and Tortoise (Open source source
code repositories and management software) were chosen over SourceSafe
(M$'s low quality code repository which should really be called
SourceUnsafe).
Your typical Linux distro consists of Linux itself, configuration
tools, language compilers and interpreters, and lots of other stuff,
all written by individuals presumably knowledgeable or expert in their
respective areas. The Internet made this sort of mass collaboration
much, much easier. Think of it this way - instead of 10,000 M$
developers sitting in their offices in Dreadmond, you have equal or
superior talent located (or unrelocated) at their homes (where they
want to live), worldwide. Compensation? Good question. Presumably,
if you are well known in the community, you go and consult. See the
world. Or work for Gurgle. Again, the established corporate practice
of employment starts to change.
Back To APL: One problem we have is that a surprising number of
programmers (in the 30+ crowd) actually think C# and Java (marketed by
the 50+ crowd) are really good languages. And for certain things,
they are really good languages. But we need to appeal to the next 30+
crowd, who are those kids sending the MMS messages on the bus to
school today.
Historically, APL has always been a very small community. APL
development was financed earlier by IBM and other hardware vendors who
had expensive boxes to sell. Today APL development is financed by
vendors whose user base numbers in the hundreds. To the traditional
corporate manager, there isn't enough money in this racket. And
that's the problem, unless there's a lot of money in it, there is no
incentive for a corporation to do anything.
However, individuals (like Linus Torvalds) are different. The motives
are different, as is their perception of risk. Here Linus wrote the
operating system, while others wrote all the parts. The statistical
library mentioned in some of the posts is a good example for potential
collaboration - a new public domain version could be written.
Earlier, there was something called IAPL, a free APL, an example of a
pre-internet collaboration, There was also something called APL\11,
written in a nice sanitary style of C before it got ugly. I imagine
these are good for learning how to write an interpreter, use lex and
yacc, etc.
In summary, as much as M$ will try to fight it, the natural evolution
will be to replace M$ with open source or shareware. I'm hoping also
that the giant corporations in general will wither to more manageable
levels.
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