4 ms·

OLE embedding and OpenDoc utterly failing has been one of my great frustrations in the computer field. I should be able to have a universal document format with

by mrkstu 8y ago

OLE embedding and OpenDoc utterly failing has been one of my great frustrations in the computer field. I should be able to have a universal document format with intelligent encapsulated data that I can manipulate in flexible ways. Excel is almost there as a standalone island, but I should be able to embed Excel's intelligence in all my documents.

rsync 8y ago
"OLE embedding and OpenDoc utterly failing has been one of my great frustrations in the computer field. I should be able to have a universal document format with intelligent encapsulated data that I can manipulate in flexible ways." I think we have had this in the form of the UNIX shell environment and various command line primitives like cat/awk/sed/grep/wc/strings. It isn't sexy and it certainly isn't a WIMP[1] paradigm like Windows (which I associate exclusively with OLE) but if you can work with ASCII text (and you should...) then I think you have that environment and those abilities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
- perl4ever 8y ago
  I'm not saying that paradigm isn't useful, but it seems like you're saying 70s technology is still good enough. But shouldn't we have come up with some improvement in the last 40 years? Really, all we've done is regained the abilities of big computers from long ago in modern microcomputers. I was just playing around with Selenium, and it was neat what you could do with it, but it was kind of depressing that it is basically a project to do for one application (or group of applications) what people used to have a vision for doing with all applications back in the 1990s (with AppleScript for instance). We keep redoing things we've done before in slightly different ways, scaling down the grand visions and retrying parts of them.

4 ms·

OLE embedding and OpenDoc utterly failing has been one of my great frustrations in the computer field. I should be able to have a universal document format with

by mrkstu 8y ago

rsync 8y ago
"OLE embedding and OpenDoc utterly failing has been one of my great frustrations in the computer field. I should be able to have a universal document format with intelligent encapsulated data that I can manipulate in flexible ways." I think we have had this in the form of the UNIX shell environment and various command line primitives like cat/awk/sed/grep/wc/strings. It isn't sexy and it certainly isn't a WIMP[1] paradigm like Windows (which I associate exclusively with OLE) but if you can work with ASCII text (and you should...) then I think you have that environment and those abilities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
- perl4ever 8y ago
  I'm not saying that paradigm isn't useful, but it seems like you're saying 70s technology is still good enough. But shouldn't we have come up with some improvement in the last 40 years? Really, all we've done is regained the abilities of big computers from long ago in modern microcomputers. I was just playing around with Selenium, and it was neat what you could do with it, but it was kind of depressing that it is basically a project to do for one application (or group of applications) what people used to have a vision for doing with all applications back in the 1990s (with AppleScript for instance). We keep redoing things we've done before in slightly different ways, scaling down the grand visions and retrying parts of them.