On May 6, 9:01=A0am, Ibeam2000 <Ibeam2...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > > One hope for the decorporatisation of humanity is the collaborative
> > > nature of the new Web. =A0But 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. =A0When 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. =A0Maybe
> 30 years was too long.
>
> We APL programmers are mostly 50+ years old and don't matter much in
> the grand scheme of things. =A0And 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. =A0Stuff 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. =A0Out to control the world, about the farthest thing
> from democratic. =A0IBM, Big Blue, was the hallmark of what a
> corporation should be. =A0Microsoft dethroned Big Blue and continues in
> the same tradition. =A0But it's only a matter of time until the
> Microsoft software business model will be synonymous with film
> developing, =A0At least IBM still has its mainframes. =A0Servers.
>
> Linux and open source, however, is the business model and product of a
> far more enlightened 30+ crowd. =A0Democratic and meritocratic, and best
> of all, anticorporate. =A0The true Hacker Ethic - continuous evolution
> and improvement for the sake of better quality and learning. =A0None of
> this execrable Vista or Office 2007 junk, upgrade for the sake of
> expensive change. =A0Or 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$'s low quality code repository which should really be called
> SourceUnsafe).
>
> Your typical Linux distro consists of Linux itself, configuration
> tools, language compilers and interpreters, and lots of other stuff,
> all written by individuals presumably knowledgeable or expert in their
> respective areas. =A0The Internet made this sort of mass collaboration
> much, much easier. =A0Think of it this way - instead of 10,000 M$
> 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. =A0Compensation? =A0Good question.
=A0Presumably=
,
> if you are well known in the community, you go and consult. See the
> world. =A0Or work for Gurgle. =A0Again, the established corporate
practice=
> of employment starts to change.
>
> Back To APL: =A0One 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. =A0And for certain things,
> they are really good languages. =A0But 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. =A0APL
> development was financed earlier by IBM and other hardware vendors who
> had expensive boxes to sell. =A0Today APL development is financed by
> vendors whose user base numbers in the hundreds. =A0To the traditional
> corporate manager, there isn't enough money in this racket. =A0And
> 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. =A0The motives
> are different, as is their perception of risk. =A0Here Linus wrote the
> operating system, while others wrote all the parts. =A0The 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. =A0I 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. =A0I'm hoping also
> that the giant corporations in general will wither to more manageable
> levels.
So where to we gofrom here?
There seem to many areas that want to use programming languages for.
- Live games
- Web applications
- E-mail
- Direct Interactions
- Graphics
- Table calculaters
- Document creations
Most other languages have a low entry point and it is easy to do
simple things.
Then there are a lotof libraries to call on for complicated
interactions.
APL has a high entry point and it is not so easy to do really simple
things.
Take a simple example:
You want to interact simply with the user.
The user is supposed to type in a line on a console.
You should send a line of text to the console.
You should be able to have the console command in an executable file.
Another simple example:
You want to interact simply with the user.
The user is supposed to type in a line on a Web input.
You should send a line of text to the Web.
You should be able to have the console command in an executable file.
Very often in the past many in the APL community were very much
occupied fighting against this or that dialect of APL and it had a
huge negative impact.
|
