11 Oct
2011
11 Oct
'11
8:42 p.m.
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. 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.
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.
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.
Yes, *programmatically generated* C. If you're smart enough to
understand the value of Scheme (and Lisp, and Erlang) you're certainly
smart enough to know what that brings with it.
No, I didn't think you said that. But you did seem to think the web
was an unpleasant step down from X11.
No, not at all! No more than corn on the cob is an unpleasant step
down from using nuts and bolts as fasteners. They are apples and
oranges, they are used in different places for different things, they
have different strengths and weaknesses...and your seeming dislike for
anything spurned by MacOS X (like X11) aside, neither of them is going
away anytime soon, at least not in the real data processing world.
Of course. We don't need that functionality anymore, except in very
rare cases.
As do I. I will try really hard to like you because of this. Really
hard.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA
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. 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. 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. Do you expect to be using X11 in *another* 20 years?
I have no idea. But you can damn well bet that I'll be a part of
guiding where it goes in the intervening time, because I'm not
spending my days floating along with whatever trendy, bloated,
buzzword-of-the-week thing the trenchcoat-wearing, clove-smoking
kids are programming...erm, I mean "writing scripts" in this week.
One thing you really need to get through your head is that I'm not
suggesting, nor did I ever suggest, nor WOULD I ever suggest, that
X11 should replace web browsers. 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.
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.