You are right -- must be a reason I buy cars and keep them a long time
(my 1980 Toyota 4x4 I bought new and now it has historic vehicle plates)
-- I think things should last. And if they work, don't change them JUST
for the sake of change. There is so much to do that needs doing,
re-doing things that work is madness. IMHO. My software was written
around 1980 -- it is a complete ERP system (that talks to business
partners, shipping companies, credit cards -- ALL with libxml2) -- it is
STILL character based, still sells well including many big-name
companies and systems as large as 12,000 users. It uses a home-grown
modified b-tree database. It is full of added functionality since 1980,
and absolutely zero technology changes. There is a market for it -- I
know it is not for everyone. Essentially I get away with a very
inexpensive hardware environment (from the machine to network to backups
to hard support), inexpensive database, etc -- that does a LOT of work.
It is a work horse, not a pretty horse. I generally sell into
industries with low gross margin that need to handle comparatively large
numbers of transactions (say T-Shirt distributors where a shirt costs
1.35 and they make 3 cents -- it takes a LOT of transactions to do 100
million in sales and they don't have a lot of margin to throw away on
anything). Hence I stay relevant in that niche. It is also why I like
Unix (we use Linux, AIX, and a lot of lesser-knowns) -- it is made to
last a long time. I have had customers with the same machine for 20
years. We just had a customer who we thought was long dead that called
after ... 20 years ... and wanted an upgrade. They had never had one
(we were Y2K compliant a long time ago). In their case our software
worked too well for too long and when they finally had a problem they
became a paying customer again.
E
On 5/7/2013 9:51 PM, Daniel Veillard wrote:
On Mon, May 06, 2013 at 11:10:46AM -0700, Eric S. Eberhard wrote:
[...]
So they paid a nice young man to replace my server with a JAVA server
(why do people feel compelled to replace working programs I'll never know
-- guess the new IT person had to feel important). JAVA has built-in XML
and TCP/IP and it was so "easy" to program, yack yack ... it also fell
to it's knees at volumes that would be about 10,000 documents per day
if it did not crash and burn when the load got high. That is less than
1/2% of what my libxml2 server can process. This, of course, led to AIX
trashing and the IT guy wanted a room full of Linux boxes with server
load balancing and all kinds of things. Fortunately sanity prevailed
and the new IT guys is gone. The cheap little AIX box purrs doing all
that work (and running the order desk, inventory, warehouse, shipping,
credit, accounting -- all in real time all on one little box) ...
Well I'm sure you too got similar story 20 years ago but with
ASM or FORTRAN instead of C, some kind of mainframe instead of AIX,
etc :-) . What we wrote will be obsolete sometimes. My own personal
goal when I code is make sure the code will stay around for long,
mothing depresses me as much as my code going to the trash (which
happened a few times, and one of the reason why I do only Open Source
code). But admitedly this is against a global economic trend, stuff
is being designed to be wasted, replaced unresonably soon, and
unfortunately that's true for code too even if it's so damn hard to
get out and running.
That's why I actually love Linux, there is no constraints put into
the code to make it suitable only to a timeframe, a platform, or
any specific use.
Sorry for going from the anecdotic to philosophic, but that thread was
already diverging :-)
Daniel
--
Eric S. Eberhard
VICS
2933 W Middle Verde Road
Camp Verde, AZ 86322
928-567-3727 work 928-301-7537 cell
http://www.vicsmba.com/index.html (our work)
http://www.vicsmba.com/ourpics/index.html (fun pictures)
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