12 Oct
2011
12 Oct
'11
6:27 a.m.
On 11/10/11 11:42 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
Yes, *programmatically generated* C. If you're smart enough to
Do you find the results slow? For what purpose? I'm serious, can you
give examples? Not just "one example that's obviously terrible" but a
wide range of examples where you discovered that you couldn't possibly
use a high level language (like Scheme).
Mainly OS X, yes. I began using it personally at 10.0. But 10.5 and 10.6
are probably the end of the line for me, like you, I think.
Well, OpenWindows supported both, but NeWS just didn't take off. When I
say, "showed the door," I mean demonstrated a far more interesting
concept. But X11 stayed around like the drunken party guest who refuses
to leave.
On 10/11/2011 11:02 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
X11 as a remote application server is almost gone, that's just the
way things went.
Yes! Years ago! I never disputed that assertion, in fact I've agreed
with it several times. What I've DISagreed with is the notion that the
WWW is the end-all, be-all of user interfaces and windowing systems that
will replace everything.
If the freedom is there, and Motif looks better, why doesn't it look
like Motif? Honest question, not trolling. I don't have time to take
that up as a new hobby.
Probably because Motif doesn't look better! (seriously!) If web app
designers wanted their stuff to look like Motif, surely they'd do it.
While I liked Motif (the look and feel, not the programming...that part
sucked!) in the early 1990s, my tastes have evolved. ;)
I don't see any company names or desktop counts. I work in that space
now and then, and I've not seen or heard of a single one.
I'm not disputing the fact that the WWW is important. I never have. I'm
disputing your ridiculous notion that it will somehow replace all user
interfaces.
I am not saying that it will, or that it should, really. Just that it
works pretty well - which might partly explain its popularity - some
might ascribe that to "worse is better," or something.
What's the difference between a web site (which
blurs readily
these days into "web application"... Google Docs... GitHub...
Twitter...) and a "remote app"?
You are picking nits, because you are a troll. YOU know the
difference (at least I sure hope you do!), and you know that I know
the difference as well. Again you imply that I think the web sucks,
X11 is great, and X11 should replace the web, and that the web is
actually replacing X11. If this is in fact what you believe, you
are incorrect on all counts. Then why doesn't the web look just like Motif,
since the web
offers everyone unprecedented aesthetic freedom??
Again with the trolling. Nothing looks like Motif, but a whole lot
of web apps look just like GTK. People
are moving to web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and
vertical-market software, replacing real software, on a massive
scale? Where, exactly? Prove it. Provide company names and number
of seats. "Test" installations and Utopian "future office"
deployments don't count.
Yes, SMEs are. It began just over a decade ago.
Can't? Didn't think so. Ok, provide OS names and release numbers.
This would need to be OSs that people actually RUN, so Chrome
doesn't count.
Um. Web browsers run on more than Chrome. Even Microsoft admitted the
web was important ... 15 years ago. That's patently absurd! But, you know what,
let's just wait
and see.
"Speed is only one metric" is something that Lisp performance apologists
have been saying for decades.
It *is* only one metric, and it doesn't imply that any particular system
is "slow". Neglect of other metrics (like expressivity, modelling power,
and maintainability) is a longstanding plague on the software business.
Interpreted JavaScript has never been faster than C on the same
hardware. If you disagree, provide proof. JIT-compiled JavaScript
has the potential for being NEARLY as fast, but I have my doubts.
It's an object-oriented language running on hardware that is
inherently procedural in nature. Bridging that gap involves
overhead.
There are several interesting cases where very high level languages
outperform C. But that's only one metric.
But yes, I've seen those cases. The fact remains that the world's
non-pretty-UI devices and performance-sensitive things are still
programmed in C for a reason. I work in THAT space (embedded systems)
all day long, that's just the way it is there. The other side of the
company I work for does nothing but pretty UIs, and all their code is in
PHP and JavaScript...where performance doesn't matter.
Of course there are niches where C makes sense. I've written more C than
anything else over the years. But very little applications programming
requires C or is appropriate in C.
There is more to computing than pretty user interfaces. The
microcontroller in your air conditioner wasn't programmed in JavaScript.
Or Lisp. And there are a lot more of those around than there are desktop
computers.
I'm talking about general business/applications programming. And web
applications.
And for
the record, my favorite language, which is slower than
just about anything else but that's not why it's my favorite, is
Scheme. I don't develop in it professionally because it's...well,
too damn slow!
We have something in common then; I like Scheme a lot. But to say
it's slow is silly. Many Schemes compile to C. understand the value of Scheme (and Lisp, and Erlang)
you're certainly
smart enough to know what that brings with it.
Erlang has HiPE. And it really, honestly, is fast enough for what people
use it for. Or they would use something else. And the same is true of
Haskell, Ocaml, Common Lisp, etc.
I don't know about you, but I've seen half a dozen Common Lisp jobs turn
up this year - not to mention other interesting languages - and I'd
rather be doing that than PHP, wouldn't you?
...
Of course. We don't need that functionality anymore, except in very
rare cases.
Or, thank goodness, shell. :D
Moving to something new, as popular distributions plan, can be a good
thing, can't it? I'm not assuming it will be a disaster at this point.
You
asserted that X11 is somehow on its way out (which it isn't)
because everything is "moving to the web" (or some such) now. That
makes about as much sense as suggesting that nuts and bolts are on
their way out, because the world is moving to corn on the cob.
X11 *as a remote computing service* is almost dead and buried. X11 in general is on its way out, but quite
slowly.
Wrong. ONE distribution of ONE desktop OS has talked about moving away
from it. One. Another one, MacOS X (only talking about its native
windowing system) is so brain-dead for anything other than pretty
pictures that one has to use VNC to get to it remotely. Not that I care
much, I have spent the last decade mostly on more modern systems.
More...modern? Like what, exactly? MacOS X, perhaps, I might almost go
along with it if it were modern enough to know what a network connection
is. This discussion began with Display PostScript and
NeWS, which showed
X11 the door, 25 years ago.
I think you mean that the other way around. Both Sun and SGI dumped NeWS
for X11. Display Postscript was never popular on anything other
than
NeXT machines, and briefly as a server extension under X11. Sun dumped
it (I think) around SunOS3, and SGI went to X11 in IRIX v4.
As do I. I will try really hard to like you because of this. Really hard.
I need to cut back on the trolling so I have time to play with them
more. *runz*
--Toby
This is
the first sensible thing you've said in a week, with the
small modification of the exceptions being the rule. Computers are
binary things. Some computers, notably IBM mainframes and PDP-11s
with the CIS option installed, can operate on text efficiently.
Most cannot, and we pay for this overhead with poor performance and
needing multi-GHz machines to do the very simplest of things.
The PDP-11 popularised byte addressing, indeed. I own quite a few.
-Dave