"Andrew Fedoniouk" <news@terrainformatica.com> wrote in message news:d0dtq7$21d9$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>
> I guess on the next level we will see "Extremely non-coupled systems" -
> systems consisting from our old friends - command line alike components
> with
> stdin/stdout probably with XML as "lingua franca" instead of plain text.
>
> And we will get UNIX again :)
> Evolution is a spiral as you know.
>
> Andrew Fedoniouk.
> http://terrainformatica.com
>

It has constantly amazed me how much (and fast!) history repeats itself, especially in the IT world.

Thin clients (terminals) -> Fat Clients (GUI) -> Thin Clients (HTML and browsers on a chip) -> Now the latest is thin code on top of fat runtimes (eg: Flash), which really brings us back to Fat Clients because a PC is needed to host the runtimes.

Centralized (Time Sharing Mainframes) -> De-centralized (PC's) -> Centralized (Web servers, multi-tier and 'virualized' Mainframes) -> De-centralized (Messaging frameworks, peer-to-peer, etc.).

And on and on it goes, with application design, development methodologies, patent issues, open source/closed source (this latest SCO/IBM thing really reminds me of the original Berkeley/AT & T suit, at least on the face of it). In-sourcing/out-sourcing and even off-shoring has been visited before. Offshoring is an interesting one - the premise even back 20 or so years ago (at that time it was Japan and Europe who were the "threat" to US developers) was that better and cheaper collaberation technology and "follow the sun" methodologies would enable that. Sound familiar? It turned out that Japan and Europe ended up needing all the developers they could turn out for work inside their own countries, which raised the cost for US companies, etc., etc... The good news for us all (developers living in a "developed" country or not) is that the expanding economies of places like India and China will likely produce the same result, and we all end-up in greater demand than before ;) Hey, programmers are an odd bunch - not everyone wants to do this type of work. Most of my buddies think I'm nuts (sitting inside staring at a friggen screen all day).

Have you ever heard that this-or-that technology will rend the job of a programmer obsolete? That piece of history has probably made the rounds more than the rest.. First it was COBOL (actually promoted as "so easy an office mgr. can create their own reports") that was going to put all of the assembly programmers out of work, but it turned out that those people were the best suited to write the COBOL applications anyhow. So since it was much more cost effective to build software, more progammers were needed, etc., etc... Then it was MS Access, OOP, HTML, etc.,etc.. My first major job was writing DiBoL on a DEC Ultrix system. Everything I've done since has gotten more and more compilcated as the improved technology has allowed us to "herd chickens" more and more effectively.

Interesting stuff all this.

- Dave

>
> Interesting stuff all this.
>

Oh, yeh! :)

Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

> BTW: Microsoft Indigo (COM+ of nowadays) uses new motto
> "Loosely coupled systems rules!" :)
> 
> I guess on the next level we will see "Extremely non-coupled systems" -
> systems consisting from our old friends - command line alike components with
> stdin/stdout probably with XML as "lingua franca" instead of plain text.
> 
> And we will get UNIX again :)
> Evolution is a spiral as you know.

The Rule of Ever Diminishing Coupling.  ;-)

I just stumbled on ImageMagic, which I hadn't noticed on my new FC3 linux. Nothing in the "start menu" about it. Well, there was a bug for a while in the dscript thing (see other post today), the debugging of which led to unexpected coupling with ImageMagic. (Don't ask!)

Anyhow, seems there are millions of these command line components, and you can do the most amazing, or actually unbelievable things to your pictures. Just a few words on the command line.

The world will have to come back to the command line. It's  like with calculators. Had we never got computers so nobody needs a calculator, then by this time the RPN ones would have taken over.

Some things just are harder at the outset. But hey, climb over the ridge, and its wide fields from then on.

An /additional/ D.NET compiler would be wonderful. It would make quick GUI development a breeze, and it would also give D developers huge amount of security. At that point it wouldn't matter if Digital Mars D compiler suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth; the existing D code could be compiled to .NET and used with C# or any other .NET language.

Also a "Managed extensions for D" where one could use .NET libraries and call native D code would be pretty sweet. That would solve the current GUI library issues nicely.

Making it work with Mono -- *DROOL*!

BTW, does anyone know whether Deja Augustine has dumped the D.NET project altogether?

In article <d0balg$2msf$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Andrew Fedoniouk says...
>
>> Speaking of .Net acceptance, does anyone know of any major commercial/shrink-wrapped products that have been released using .Net (not including web-apps.)?
>>
>
>Visual Studio 2005 Beta.
>
>But time it first time started up is 7 times bigger than compilation of all my projects in C++ on working machine.
>

I should rephrase that - "using .Net" should have been "running CLR assemblies" (VS 2005 looks to still be 'native' binaries).

You're right - VS 2005 Beta is quite large ;)

- Dave

"Andrew Fedoniouk" <news@terrainformatica.com> wrote in message news:d0bbs7$2nsr$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Hmmm,
> Are you sure about "silver bullet"? Probably "golden egg"? No?
>
> And about the Framework, I think Joel is right here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PleaseLinker.html
>
> With the full respect to Microsoft (stability and richness of Win32 API is
> worth to monument, honestly) but for me evolutions of Microsoft's attempts
> to invent "silver bullets" looks like a sequence of "hells"
> transforming one into another, see:
>
> DLL hell,
> Component hell,
> Assembly hell,
> and now we are entering the era of Framework hells.
>
> Perfect. But I just tired, want to rest "lilebit" on something solid :)
>
> Andrew Fedoniouk.
> http://terrainformatica.com

Wouldn't we all like a little stability, but MS will see that never happens. My point was that MS will sell .Net as the next great thing that will solve all desktop, IT, and security problems and a large mass of programmers will accept it and even evangelize it.  So not being compatible with this "movement" will make D seem suspect, foreign, uncool, etc.

In article <d0hdv2$275o$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Niko Korhonen says...

>BTW, does anyone know whether Deja Augustine has dumped the D.NET project altogether?

I don't know the status of the project. I added a question about it at http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DDotNet since the website listed there is invalid and I found an out-of-date website by playing with the URL. I hope he's just taking a break from the project since it sounded very interesting to me.


jcc7