On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 13:06 -0700, Darren New wrote: > Paul G. Allen wrote: > > Name one. > > Any system you're running on Windows that you don't expect to have to be > around for a long time.
I expect everything I write to be around for a long time. Expecting otherwise all too often creates more work for myself and probably others. > > For example, I know folks who are doing the calculations for movie > special effects using C#. The overhead isn't high enough to make it a > non-starter, it's easier to understand, and once it finishes, you're done. I know of many more that don't use Windows at all for anything related to movies. (BTW, define "movie", as in AVI, WMV, Hollywood produced movies?). While at Akamai, I had to write some scripts for doing movie calculations, and I used Perl so that everything could be used on any platform at any time. If one is going to put the effort into writing something, even if they think it's a one-off, why do it so that it only runs on a single platform and can't be used elsewhere? It's never a good idea to assume a program will never be needed again, as it often is. > > Any program that will be obsolete faster than C# is won't have a problem > with C# being obsolete. > > You calculate the cost of the proprietariness in as part of doing > business. Saying "C# is closed and thus worthless" is like saying > "Adjustable rate mortgages will always fuck you." Nonsense. Sorry if > your business acumen is insufficient to make this sort of judgment. When selecting something for either the use of my company, or use by myself (whether at home or for my own business), I always consider the cost or benefit of using something proprietary. I always avoid the proprietary if at all possible, especially if it is not based upon a truely open standard. Locking in to a certain vendor, platform, etc. is a bad business practice, especially when dealing with PCs. I've seen how much this costs companies in many aspects, and I can't think of a single instance where the selection of a proprietary language was (or will ever be) a Good Thing. > > Given that MS is, to a large extent, working to maintain backward > compatibility in many things, and given that open source projects like > Ruby nevertheless needlessly break backward compatibility with every > minor release, I don't see where having it "open" is that big a win. How > many Java AWT-based applets still run? How many of them ran, and still run, on multiple platforms? How many C#/.NET programs run on multiple platforms? How portable are C#/.NET programs? How long before M$ changes something in C#/.NET such that an upgrade is required? > > It doesn't look like YouTube or Google Video are having a whole lot of > trouble due to using proprietary codecs either. > Let's not go into proprietary codecs now. That's just one more thing that chaps my hide. PGA -- Paul G. Allen BSIT/SE Owner/Sr. Engineer Random Logic Consulting www.randomlogic.com -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
