Re: In the Shallow End

Dan Johnson wrote:

"GreyCloud" <mist@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:-OGdnYnY-I9TZ0HZnZ2dnUVZ_tSdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dan Johnson wrote:

[snip- MS drops Fortran]

That's an odd non-sequitur. What are you getting at?

Simple. They've always hinted at equaling or going beyond what DEC had offered in development tools, but never did.


What are these wonderful DEC development tools you
refer to? When I used VMS- many years ago in my misspent
youth- the development tools were not impressive at all.


Their languages were complete and well documented. Their libraries were complete and well documented without leaving anything out that one might want. Ex: you can open a file as indexed and key on anything you want to do. Back then MS never had anything like it. You had to roll your own custom database back then. I could also mix language very easily under VMS. All I had to do was link all the object modules together to make a complete program from using the various strengths of each language. Their stack frame was standardized, unlike what MS had pushed out where some languages you had to futz with the stack first.
What was the deal in MS Fortran where you had to use [HUGE] or [LARGE] or [SMALL] and other non standard labels? Then they had to preface a call saying that the subroutine was in pascal. I never had to do this in vms. DEC made it dirt easy.

Anyway, it still seems a non-sequitur. MS has dropped
a very old language- Fortran- for a shiny new one- C#. This
seems to suggest forward motion on their part.


Intel just wrote Fortran 2003. There is a very good reason to use fortran where numeric accuracy has to be kept and flagged when you lose that accuracy. That was the purpose of many languages on one main frame in the older days. Each language had its own strengths and weaknesses.


Another problem is that MS has actually stagnated the market.


I do not think MS can be blamed for Apple mistakes,
nor those of the Unix vendors. If Apple did not produce
great products sooner, that's *Apple's* fault. They wasted
a lot of time and effort producing not much in the mid
nineties.


Let me put it a different way. Back before IBM made the PC, there were many micro-computer makers that were rolling out some nice machines that could do multi-user/multi-tasking at a low cost. Then along came the IBM PC. Everybody jumped over there due to Big Blues influence. Everybody was hoping for some of that mainframe technology to filter down to the PC... it never happened. Every one waited a decade for MS to come out with a multi-tasking o/s that never showed up. By then most of the other vendors died out leaving the public with MS-DOS. That's what I mean by stagnation.
The industry was pushed back a decade and shouldn't have happened.


Now that Apple is figuring it out, things may again be
competitive.


They already have. This starting in the mid-nineties with
Sun's Java.

This is an excellent development. Microsoft is at its best
when competing with other vendors. During the period that
MS was unchallenged, they spent their time animating ordinary
office products with a perverse unlife. [1]


In this case, MS went out of their way to derail Java by incorporating their own changes to Java... which led to a lawsuit.

And Apple's more recent efforts are also welcome. They are
shallow, as I said, but if nobody is trying to top Window's
UI, then that UI won't improve much.


There should be a diversity of UIs out there to suit various needs. I doubt one will be a panacea for all.

[1] Clippy!


Don't forget their dog.


--
Where are we going?
And why am I in this handbasket?
.

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