On Sep 14, 2006, at 3:17 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
If you are a multi-billion dollar company why interoperate? Just declare the rest of the market for suckers and dilettantes. Unfortunately for billion dollar companies its turtles all the way down and they struggle mightily just to interoperate with their own products--and largely fail. Seems to me the very concept of a multi-billion dollar company as software producer put up against small groups of hackers is absurd anyway. It really hinges on the make up of the small teams of people inside that large capital structure that are doing the real work anyway. Plenty of fine coders exist inside and out of such large companies and depending on management and marketing or acquisitions they may have more or less time to deliver a finished product. But more often than not, though a billion dollar company may be good at well crafted design process, I would bet they find their best ideas from those who do something for the sake of art as an amateur, or to push forward the frontier of ideas as a scholar. 'Can't we all just get along?' What we are talking around here is just as personal as race and politics--where do you fall on the artist<--scientist-->engineer spectrum. Engineers are most comfortable in slow moving vehicles with plenty of restraints and air bags. Artists are most happy in new concept cars that are untried and untested--they might die but at least it will be a statement of some sort. And of course testing cars is for scientists. (Some may quibble with this, but I would have to say check out the difference between math departments in an Engineering school versus an arts and sciences school -- Engineers are most comfortable working with equations from a table and processes from a lab manual, scientists get a big kick out of deriving equations that are already in that engineering text. And I think artists are largely there for the drugs and the women..) I couldn't imagine the same languages appealing to all three crowds. And why should they? We can certainly tell a lot by the tools a person uses (and the company they keep). And if you don't like engineers I would say better to avoid C++, project managers, and multi-billion dollar companies. Another angle to this whole mess is that it is possible to write very unstable and largely un-useful code in C++, it just takes a long time to get there. If you want, you can get there faster in python. --joshua |
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