On Thursday, 11 February 2016 at 10:21:19 UTC, Joakim wrote:
You heard them above. Sun is basically inbreeding. That tends
to be good
to bring out specific characteristics of a breed, and tends to
be good for
_specialization_.
Linus is not a very good analyst. All the big iron corporations
had transition problems: Cray, SGI, IBM, Sun and many more.
It would be very difficult to take the expertise SUN had and
rapidly turn SUN into a competitive force in a different field.
Of course, none of this is relevant to programming languages.
Perl died because Python was better. Not because the niches
changed. C++11 is replacing C/C++98 for newer projects that need
performance. Better hardware means the niche has shrunk, but it
will remain a significant niche.
