Re: Anti-Ada FUD (rant)

[Bill Richards <billrich@gmx.com>]

On 2013-09-23, Bill Findlay <yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On 23/09/2013 08:00, in article l1oour$t7r$1@speranza.aioe.org, "Bill
> Richards" <billrich@gmx.com> wrote:
>
>> ...  There will never be
>> a good desktop experience on UNIX/Linux (not that it bothers me personally)
>
> OS X gives me a pretty good desktop experience.

And? This is no contradiction to what I said. If anything it's simply proof
of what I said. Apple's desktop isn't thousands of ad-hoc pieces of code
that depend on thousands of other ad-hoc pieces. It's a GUI designed as a
GUI, to integrate with their other pieces.

>> simply because thousands of small programs sloppily thrown together and
>> relying on thousands of other sloppily written small programs don't scale
>> and can't be bashed into a coherent whole. How much time must go by until
>> the motley UNIX crew realize this isn't working?
>
> Well it "hasn't" ( really?) been working for 40+ years and I don't see that
> changimg anytime soon.  Strawmen (geddit?) are not a substitute for well
> founded argument.

Try as I might to parse those two sentences, I can't derive any semantic
value in them. 

At any rate UNIX existing /= "working". The first years don't count since
"UNIX" was single user, and ran only on a PDP-7 of which only 200 were
made. All that history hasn't helped. It's a sloppy mess that just
oozes. You would think with all that time to design and refine they wouldn't
be facing the same categories of errors with every new version. Race
conditions, buffer overflows. Everything's an add-on. Nothing is planned.
Things just happen when they happen. It's pure software reactionism and
totally counter to everything Ada stands for.

>
> ...
>
>> If they spent as much time polishing their code as they
>> do their silly communist license boilerplate we'd have quite a different
>> situation by now 
>
> "communist"?  Your're a teabagger, aren't you? 8-)

I don't know what a teabagger is but I do know communism when I read
it. Free Software Manifesto? Viral forcible open source licensing? No
thanks. I write proprietary software and they sell it. Then I support it. No
excuses, no blaming libraries or dependencies or other fingerpointing. We
stand by what we sell and the only thing our software depends on is the OS.

>
>> ;-)
>
> Was that *whole* post tongue-in-cheek?

Not at all. UNIX just happened. C just happened. Personally I have no use
for either. I simply prefer good designs and discipline to the sloppy
expedience of UNIX. If it weren't free as in doesn't cost money, UNIX/Linux
wouldn't have been able to blot out most of the native species.

Communists need a religion and quite a few of them seem to have chosen
Stallmanism. I prefer Adam's words about knowing who to thank when the
plane doesn't crash. Really a nice post.

Bill