On Thursday, 22 December 2011 at 17:35:09 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
Ok then, if you're claiming that I'm wrong and a programmer
*does* have a
legitimate excuse for not having a 7z-capable program, perhaps
you could
state what that legitimate excuse is instead of merely being
contradictory?
There are some funny consequences to this. If something
completely pisses you off, it might actually be an indication
we're doing something right. And if you say something is
perfect for you, that's almost always a reason to worry.
Oof, I think saying that here was uncalled for.
But seriously, I think this discussion is neglecting to account
for the subjective aspects, mainly segmentation by operating
system. This decade cross-platform software is becoming more
ubiquitous, but it wasn't that long ago that GUI applications
(the only kind regular users care about) that worked on different
major platforms were exceedingly rare - and when you switched
operating systems, you practically always had to simply look for
analogies for the software you used on the old system. By this
follows that the major OSes had their own established software
packaging methods - installers and archives of various sorts on
Windows, .dmg / .pkg / .sit for OS X, and tarballs for POSIX.
Windows inherits much of its user base (and thus, user
mannerisms) from the DOS days, back when there were dozens of
archivers in common use (anyone remembers ARC, ARJ, LHA?). RAR
and ZIP survived the test of time, with 7-Zip quickly gaining
traction after its appearance due to improved compression
algorithms.
I know Nick uses Windows, same as myself, and from last I heard
Andrei uses a Mac. So, it's no wonder that there's such a huge
disconnect of opinion - the Mac software ecosystem lived (and
still lives, to some extent) in its own different world.
