On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 15:02:42 UTC, Etienne wrote:
> On 2014-05-16 10:57 AM, Chris wrote:
>>
>> And companies are run by humans, if I'm not completely mistaken. It's
>> not the army that kills people, it's the humans in the army that kill
>> other humans. Stoutly reasoned!
>>
>>> Hatred for humans because they serve other humans under a banner is
>>> just plain ignorance
>>
>> Who's talking about hatred? Being skeptical doesn't involve hatred. The
>> thing is that the best engineers cannot put their ideas into practice,
>> if the company rejects it for whatever reason (there are so many, partly
>> highly ridiculous, reasons why good ideas have been rejected, one could
>> write a book about it). And yes, if humans serve under a banner, you
>> have the right to criticize them, because they accept the banner and
>> what it stands for. The fact that we all have to serve somebody to put
>> food on our tables, doesn't mean it is right.
>
> I think we're both right, just arguing about the risks of both extremities of the evilness scale in companies. They can be really good, and really bad. Break down those too big to fail more power to the people etc. etc.

Yep. Look at the open source communities, all the forks and fights. There used to be Tango vs Phobos. On the other hand, it's good that people can just do their own thing, if they're not happy with an existing project (for what ever reason). With companies, you have to stick with whatever decision they make, you ain't got no choice there. I remember that Apple removed my development tools after an upgrade and I had to download them again through the AppStore (had to register etc.). That was it for me. Good night! I'm on ArchLinux now. Never looked back.

On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:03:05 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>
> Dart compiles to JS, but drops support for IE9 after this summer… so it isn't a mono culture, but you do depend on Google strategic planning by using Dart.
>
As I understand it, you take a substantial performance hit for doing so.

Belay that, if I wanted a compiler centipede, I'd be more interested in targeting Haxe: community-driven and it lets me _also_ target C#, JVM, and a number of other silly things.

-Wyatt

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 03:20:33PM +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> Yep. Look at the open source communities, all the forks and fights. There used to be Tango vs Phobos. On the other hand, it's good that people can just do their own thing, if they're not happy with an existing project (for what ever reason). With companies, you have to stick with whatever decision they make, you ain't got no choice there. I remember that Apple removed my development tools after an upgrade and I had to download them again through the AppStore (had to register etc.). That was it for me. Good night! I'm on ArchLinux now. Never looked back.

Yeah, the thing with open source is that if you don't like something, you have the right and the ability to go and change it yourself. With proprietary software, you're out of luck. The most you can do is to submit a bug report and pray that they will fix it soon, hopefully in the next release, which is probably months or perhaps years away.

I remember one time there was a nasty Phobos bug that was a showstopper for one of my projects. I needed the fix right away, since it was critical to the project, and judging by the track record of D bugfixes, it may take months before somebody notices the issue in bugzilla. Well, no problem, just checkout git HEAD, find the offending code, add a temporary fix to it. Then I can happily resume my project without worrying too much, until the "official" fix is merged.  With a proprietary product, usually you don't even get to *see* their bugtracker, much less dig into the code and fix it yourself. Your project gets stuck with imperfect workarounds that only works sometimes, and you have to uglify your code which becomes a maintenance nightmare down the road. If Phobos had been a proprietary product, I would've given up D and moved on to something else.


T

-- 
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

On 5/16/2014 9:21 AM, Etienne wrote:
> On 2014-05-16 9:12 AM, Chris wrote:
>>
>> I don't trust product / company centric software. It will lock you in or
>> lock you out.
>
> Google doesn't have a reputation of creating company centric software.
> SPDY was adopted by other browsers as well. If steam picks up on Dart,
> it could very well be adopted even by IE14 if that browser doesn't go
> the Netscape way ;)

Google's reputation hasn't very well matched it's reality for quite some time. They basically don't give much more of a rat's ass about standards and compatibility than MS these days. Even Gmail's alleged "POP3" feature works in bizarre non-POP3 ways. If they don't even give half a shit about making something as basic and standard as POP3 behave like it's supposed to, how can anything that's much more heavily Google-based be trusted long-term?

Even if NaCl/Dart/whatever do wind up in all the other browsers, the modern-day Google would be prone to making goofy arbitrary changes to their version on a whim, with or without reasonable justification. It's just how Google is these days. They're not the cute little upstart they were 15 years ago. They're a 600lb gorilla now, they full well know it, and they're not afraid to use that to pull whatever they feel like. "Don't be evil" my ass. It's not as if that was ever setting a very high bar in the first place.

On 5/16/2014 10:41 AM, Chris wrote:
> On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:20:36 UTC, Etienne wrote:
>>
>> I'll have to go with: If it managed to serve corporate interest,
>> that's because you were satisfied by it and suggested to others to
>> "vote with their money".
>
> ... or because nobody ever had a real choice

...or because fools are plentiful and easily swayed by theatrics, popularity, gimmicks, projected image and other such easily-manipulated and fabricated idiocy.

There's all sorts of reasons why the whole "voting with their wallets" thing is a complete and total fantasy.

On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:15:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Mind you, how many of the big "be all end all"-technologies that have been hyped over the years are really good (including community base projects)? JS, Java, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, iOS, Android ...? With good I mean really good, not omnipresent.

Agree with you on all of those, except for iOS.  I know many of us hate how much its success is driven by marketing, but it appears to be a very solid product technically.  At least that's what I read, I haven't bought an Apple product in a decade because of their crazy stance on patents and how closed they've become.

However, just looking at iOS technically, even the latest iPad Air and iPhone 5s run on just 1 GB of RAM and still regularly outperform Android devices, which is crazy considering Android superphones/tablets have up to 3 GBs of RAM these days.  iOS devices repeatedly benchmark as the least laggy for touch.  Nick may not believe in people voting with their wallets, but iOS devices have garnered Apple a couple hundred billion in profits so far:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-and-Apple-reportedly-earned-87.9-of-the-smartphone-market-profits-for-the-last-6-years_id54030

I suppose you can hate on Obj-C, but that's not really iOS.  The latest release got bogged down in all the bling, but that's more like Apple heaped too much icing on top: the cake is still great.

Why isn't iOS good?

Am 16.05.2014 21:53, schrieb Joakim:
> On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:15:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> Mind you, how many of the big "be all end all"-technologies that have
>> been hyped over the years are really good (including community base
>> projects)? JS, Java, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, iOS, Android ...? With good I
>> mean really good, not omnipresent.
>
> Agree with you on all of those, except for iOS.  I know many of us hate
> how much its success is driven by marketing, but it appears to be a very
> solid product technically.  At least that's what I read, I haven't
> bought an Apple product in a decade because of their crazy stance on
> patents and how closed they've become.
>
> However, just looking at iOS technically, even the latest iPad Air and
> iPhone 5s run on just 1 GB of RAM and still regularly outperform Android
> devices, which is crazy considering Android superphones/tablets have up
> to 3 GBs of RAM these days.  iOS devices repeatedly benchmark as the
> least laggy for touch.  Nick may not believe in people voting with their
> wallets, but iOS devices have garnered Apple a couple hundred billion in
> profits so far:
>
> http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-and-Apple-reportedly-earned-87.9-of-the-smartphone-market-profits-for-the-last-6-years_id54030
>
>
> I suppose you can hate on Obj-C, but that's not really iOS.  The latest
> release got bogged down in all the bling, but that's more like Apple
> heaped too much icing on top: the cake is still great.
>
> Why isn't iOS good?

No, when compared against what Symbian OS could do with less resources.

On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 15:54:44 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> As I understand it, you take a substantial performance hit for doing so.

I haven't noticed this much. It is a bit more annoying to debug on IE. I doubt you get much more than a 40% penalty, but you also get working closures, this-pointer etc.

> Belay that, if I wanted a compiler centipede, I'd be more interested in targeting Haxe: community-driven and it lets me

I like the concept, but it takes a lot of resources to cover browser bugs. Dart targets current browsers and are tested against them. It provides polyfills where the browser is lacking and gives you booleans to test for features. You have to count in the libraries, IDE, debugger etc.

On 5/16/2014 3:53 PM, Joakim wrote:
> On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:15:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> Mind you, how many of the big "be all end all"-technologies that have
>> been hyped over the years are really good (including community base
>> projects)? JS, Java, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, iOS, Android ...? With good I
>> mean really good, not omnipresent.
>
> Agree with you on all of those, except for iOS.  I know many of us hate
> how much its success is driven by marketing, but it appears to be a very
> solid product technically.  At least that's what I read, I haven't
> bought an Apple product in a decade because of their crazy stance on
> patents and how closed they've become.
>
> However, just looking at iOS technically, even the latest iPad Air and
> iPhone 5s run on just 1 GB of RAM and still regularly outperform Android
> devices, which is crazy considering Android superphones/tablets have up
> to 3 GBs of RAM these days.  iOS devices repeatedly benchmark as the
> least laggy for touch.  Nick may not believe in people voting with their
> wallets, but iOS devices have garnered Apple a couple hundred billion in
> profits so far:
>
> http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-and-Apple-reportedly-earned-87.9-of-the-smartphone-market-profits-for-the-last-6-years_id54030
>
>
> I suppose you can hate on Obj-C, but that's not really iOS.  The latest
> release got bogged down in all the bling, but that's more like Apple
> heaped too much icing on top: the cake is still great.
>
> Why isn't iOS good?

The problem with iOS devices isn't software bloat, it's overall design and, as you mentioned, Apple's...uhh...orwellian-ness. (IMO, anyway) I could go on and on and on about iPhone's design problems (and have done so ;) )

And I'm not surprised Android is a little slower/laggier than iOS, what with Dalvik. I don't care how much they've optimized it, a JVM-alike at the system-level on a mobile device is just asking for "second-place at best" (performance-wise anyway). They're now forced to go out of their way with stuff like ART just to mitigate some of the problems Dalvik introduced. That's the one big thing I *do* think Apple really got right - native system-level with ARC, instead of mobile JVM clone.

(FWIW/BTW, MS has actually hit a rather interesting middle-ground with WinRT's sort-of-a-VM-but-not-exactly approach. Not that I'm a fan of Win8/WinRT/Metro/MS/etc, but that particular aspect is quite noteworthy IMO.)

> Nick may not believe in people voting with their wallets,

Well, to be clear (and without trying to get too political about it), I do believe in *attempting* to vote with one's wallet, and that it can be a *factor* in what succeeds and what doesn't. I just don't believe it's remotely close to being the sole primary factor or that it remotely implies "what succeeds must therefore be good". And I think all that's unfortunate.

On 5/16/2014 4:10 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 16.05.2014 21:53, schrieb Joakim:
>>
>> Why isn't iOS good?
>
> No, when compared against what Symbian OS could do with less resources.
>

I don't know what the hardware was like on Symbian's short-lived touch-screen stuff, but heck, PalmOS ran beautifully on a 16MHz Dragonball with 8MB RAM (and yea, those are "M"s, not "G"s), let alone the later ARM-based Palms. (I loved my Visor Deluxe and Zire 71 :) )