On 8 Feb 2005, at 1:24 am, Nick Arnett wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:
That might be the correct word. I'm not sure what else could be used to describe how VBS was given total system integration from the beginning, with hooks into (more ore less literally) every portion of the OS. IIRC there were more than a few people, in the pre-95 days, who warned (or tried to warn) MS that they were treading a dangerous path.
But given the other, successful script models that already existed out there, It's hard to fathom why Bill did it as he did.
VB's inventor (Alan Cooper, who was not at Microsoft) was focusing on creating something like HyperCard for Windows -- a tool that would make it easy to hook UI components together with code. I vaguely recall that he didn't do all the OS integration stuff.
I'll speculate that after Microsoft took it over (and Alan walked away), they didn't even consider the implications of networked Windows machines. This was quite a while ago... when it was relatively safe to have tools that could wreak havoc, since they could only screw up the local machine.
Not excusing them, but this history goes back pretty far. The idea of ordinary people having their machines on the Internet was pretty far-fetched. This was in the days when a typical machine came with 20 or 30 megabytes... of hard disk space.
Then why did they give the web browser and email client the ability to run random arbitrary code from the net (with root privileges!) after the internet became commonplace? Every other OS maker made great efforts to *avoid* that. Sun created Java in its VM sandbox precisely so it could *not* be used to do the sort of things things that MS were claiming as a great feature of their insecure software. We didn't see Apple rushing to add the ability to automatically run Applescript attachments in Mail.
Anyone with the slightest clue could see that MS' approach was a disastrously bad idea, but they did it anyway, deliberately.
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." - Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
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