* Craig Gullixson peremptorily fired off this memo:
> I think your are a little naive in beliving that standards don't
> matter. The C standard matters, the POSIX standard matters, the
> TCP standard matters, etc. For those who want government contracts,
> standards matter. That the standardization process is currently
> somewhat broken does not make it useless. The light being shown on
> the OOXML corruption in this group is a step in the right direction
> for making the process better.
I haven't seen that light shining in conventional news outlets, however.
> Some developers, such as myself, need some level of stability, or
> the systems we put together are not *maintainable*. Just saying
> that we're in a world where things are rapidly evolving, so just
> get used to it, doesn't hack it. You are pretty much telling me
> to choose between vendor lockin and DLL hell, and a world where
> one is in constant maintainance cycles, trying to keep up with
> releases of all sorts of tools and libraries evolving in all sorts
> of directions. Neither option is satisfactory.
Microsoft deliberately churns what they do, to force competition to play
catch-up. I think some of the cool technology they've produced have
blinded business to that fact. Maybe they've changed, and so maybe .NET
will be their last major API. <grin> I've never understood why
business tolerates this churn.
The open-source churn is also there. There's always something new
coming down the pike.
However, you can rely on POSIX and general UNIX API stability for a lot
of the projects, I think.
Here's an unfortunate instance I've seen recently, though: TaskJuggler.
A very nice concept, a project-management tool that you can access with
a text editor. You can generate Gantt charts easily (and Pert charts,
not so easily).
What are they doing now, though? Changing the language from C++ to
Ruby. I do not see any up-side in doing that.
--
Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came
along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told
me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah,
I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we
realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than
had been recognized in our strategy.
-- Bill Gates, Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in
"Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998) [1]
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