Gilboa Davara wrote on 2003-06-24:

> On Tue, 2003-06-24 at 15:55, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
>
> > Let me doubt the Captian being a programmer :-).  I stipulate that the
> > percent of programmers exposed to unix is much higher than the percent
> > of users exposed to them.  I'd guess that more than half of all
> > programmers in the world have written something for unix in their life
> > (God bless the universities ;).  Granted, this depends on the
> > definition of "developer", I don't mean people after 3-month courses.
>
> But the percentage is getting lower and lower.

I wasn't aware of that, but then I never checked any real data.  I do
see that the number of open-source programmers is constantly
increasing.

> My guess it that in general close to 80% of the programmers getting out
> to the workforce today, will 'do' java/C#/VB most of their professional
> life...

"Do" is less important.  I will 'do' these things if I'm forced too
(well, except VB ;) but I'll run away at the first opportunity.  The
more he makes me use them, the faster I'll run away!  And I will try
to import my favorite tools into any given environment,
DJGPP/cygwin/jython style.

> and with "design" (YUCK!) tools getting better and better, most
> developers are on their way to become (Winders only) apes. (And stupid
> ones. Heck, I heard some big chief from a big company a couple of weeks
> ago stating that "you can't write 'real' servers in C [C++?]... only
> in... wait... it's coming... VB.ant!" I pity the man working under this
> wastebasket)
>
Paul Graham's essays, in particular `Beating the Averages`__ argue
that this chief and his company will lose.  A person not working under
such a "wastebasket" will outperform his programmers, strongly enough
that sooner or later he will lose.  He is not releveant because with
such attitudes, he will not design the future.  Writing linux programs
is easier than writing equivallent windows programs, so in the long
run linux will define the future.  No matter how big is MicroSoft's
momentum, once linux passes a certain threshold, there is only one
long-run result: MS will lose.  Yes, I'm optimistic.

__ http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

> > Now, do you remember your feeling when you had to use some MS
> > develoment tool (no matter which)?  Compare that to the feeling of
> > using any linux development tool.  There is precisely one reason for
> > Unix's outstanding success: it's an OS created by hackers, for
> > hackers.  And it's almost perfect for them.  MS can't compete with
> > that, no matter how hard it tries.
>
> Actually, I'm using GDB/DDD as I write this and I just wish someone
> would port the text mode Watcom debugger (DOS/Win/OS2) to Linux :-)
> Hey... But that's me...
>
Well, it's notable that you hunger for a text-mode debugger ;-).  And
that it's not written by MS.  I've never used Watcom products but I
heard they were popular with hackers.

My point is that developers are the last concern about GNU/Linux's
future because they are the ones who brought it to be.

-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

"Reading the documentation I felt like a kid in a toy shop."
 -- Phil Thompson on Python's standard library

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