On 2008-01-07, at 16:45, David Cantrell wrote:
Peter da Silva wrote:
I'm beginning to hate the people who are writing open source code
based on a proprietary system (and don't get me started on MONO).
That bothers me far less than the people writing open source code
based on open systems like C and Unix but which only work on
particular platforms.
You mean "sure it's portable, it runs on RHEL *and* Fedora!"?
No, I have to say that's less hateful for me. At least there's a
chance that I can port it to an open system if I need it badly
enough, but this stuff is C# code, often using APIs that Microsoft
hasn't opened up. Even when it isn't, it can't call or be called by
open systems code, and it pretty much has to be run inside its
own .NET environment. It might as well be in Pascal or COBOL for all
the good it does me.
I've written portable code on MS-DOS, AmigaDOS, VMS (before OpenVMS),
etc etc etc... and it was all cross-portable to all these platforms
and UNIX, any place I had C and stdio... and was *native* on all of
them. Including parsing native command line syntax (using an
extension of Eric Allman's original Parseargs). And I've done the
same kind of thing in Forth and Fortran as well... and even (for my
sins) a bit of BASIC. Hell, I've had programs that ran with a Forth,
Fortran, or C main depending ojn what platform they were on. So it's
not like I'm stuck on UNIX. I'm just not a big fan of languages with
an isolated virtual machine as a core part of the design... and that
started bugging me with APL in the '70s. It's why I think the
Smalltalk environment is a chunk of hate that distracts people from
the sweet language underneath it, and the Java virtual machine is
hate as well.
