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Yeah. Never used Oracle Forms but did use Delphi a lot. Borland never tried to solve distribution any better than Microsoft did. These firms were born in the er

Yeah. Never used Oracle Forms but did use Delphi a lot. Borland never tried to solve distribution any better than Microsoft did. These firms were born in the era when "shipping" was meant literally and showed no interest in the problem of how to change software more than once every few years. Then people realized you could iterate a web app every day if you wanted to, the way they worked gave you total insight into what users were actually doing, you could use scripting languages better than VB and more. Businesses wanted the agility, devs wanted to use UNIX and Perl instead of VB/Delphi and the web was off to the races. There were other issues of course, it wasn't just about distribution. Too bad so many downsides came along with the upsides. The real goal for OS research should be IMHO to find ways to combine what people like about web dev with what people like about desktop/mobile dev. All the action is above the POSIX layer.

mwcampbell 4y ago
> the way they worked gave you total insight into what users were actually doing How do you suggest achieving this in desktop apps? Some kind of log streaming?
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Most RDBMS have auditing features these days. Unless there's a lot of complex logic on the client that's sufficient. Otherwise yes, there are plenty of libraries and services for collecting and analyzing logs these days. I've looked at streaming Java Flight Recorder logs too, but it's probably overkill.
mwcampbell 4y ago
> devs wanted to use UNIX and Perl instead of VB/Delphi What do you think drove this? Presumably plenty of people in the dark mass of 9-to-5 devs were happy with VB/Delphi. Jonathan Edwards has written [1] that VB came from "a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web." Did nerdy devs like me, with our adolescent anti-Microsoft attitude (speaking for myself anyway; I was born in 1980), ruin everything? [1]: https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=865 https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=865
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  The language and libraries situation on Windows wasn't great during this time. Delphi was good but a compiled language with manual memory management. It was very easy to write code that crashed, which would nuke the user's state leaving little evidence of what happened. It also had a lot of legacy quirks like not allowing circular dependencies between compilation units, networking support was poor (iirc TCP, HTTP and other classes required you to buy a third party library). The VCL was a wrapper around Win32, which had some great strengths but also really frustrating weaknesses e.g. extremely poor/non-existent layout management, poor support for typography and no support for styling or branding. There were many positive aspects of course. Microsoft gave you VB or C++, both with Win32 again. The C++ developer experience was horrid. VB was at least a scripting language with garbage collection, but, it was also constrained by the fact that B stood for "Beginners" so Microsoft were very reluctant to fix any of its legacy or add more powerful features. Compared to that situation, scripting languages and especially Perl had some massive advantages: 1. Ran on UNIX/Big Iron which is where all the best hardware and databases could be found. Lots of devs liked UNIX because it was CLI and developer oriented. 2. Unashamedly designed for experts with tons of powerful features, quality of life stuff like integrated regex, garbage collection, proper stack traces, error logs you could view via telnet within seconds etc. 2. CPAN provided an ever growing repository of open source libraries, instantly accessible, for free! On Windows there were very few libraries, they were mostly quite expensive and closed source, no easy way to discover them (pre-Google) and only C++/Delphi devs could write them. VB was sort of a consumer-only language. Open source culture started with RMS at the MIT AI lab and so was very UNIX centric for a long time. Arguably it still is. Really, it's hard to overstate how revolutionary proper garbage collection + CPAN was. GC is a force multiplier and CPAN is the granddaddy of all the open source library repositories we take for granted today. Imagine how unproductive you'd be without them. The big downside was that Perl had no UI libraries and didn't really run on Windows. So how do you use it to write apps for normal people? Then Netscape started adding interactivity features to the web and it was all totally text based. Text was Perl's forte! Add the <form> tag, CGI, HTTP and now you're cooking with gas. Bye bye hateful 0xC00005 Access Violation errors and useless bug reports like "I clicked a button and the app disappeared". The web was a huge step back for users, who went from having pretty sophisticated GUIs with fast table views, menus, shortcut keys, context menus, Office integration, working copy/paste, instant UI response etc to ... well, the web. But often users will suffer through that if it makes their devs more productive because all they really care about are features and competitive advantage. The web was crude but it let people escape the Windows ecosystem to one with open source + GC + pro languages + big iron UNIX.

mwcampbell 4y ago

> the way they worked gave you total insight into what users were actually doing How do you suggest achieving this in desktop apps? Some kind of log streaming?

mike_hearn 4y ago
Most RDBMS have auditing features these days. Unless there's a lot of complex logic on the client that's sufficient. Otherwise yes, there are plenty of libraries and services for collecting and analyzing logs these days. I've looked at streaming Java Flight Recorder logs too, but it's probably overkill.

mwcampbell 4y ago

> devs wanted to use UNIX and Perl instead of VB/Delphi What do you think drove this? Presumably plenty of people in the dark mass of 9-to-5 devs were happy with VB/Delphi. Jonathan Edwards has written [1] that VB came from "a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web." Did nerdy devs like me, with our adolescent anti-Microsoft attitude (speaking for myself anyway; I was born in 1980), ruin everything? [1]: https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=865 https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=865

mike_hearn 4y ago
The language and libraries situation on Windows wasn't great during this time. Delphi was good but a compiled language with manual memory management. It was very easy to write code that crashed, which would nuke the user's state leaving little evidence of what happened. It also had a lot of legacy quirks like not allowing circular dependencies between compilation units, networking support was poor (iirc TCP, HTTP and other classes required you to buy a third party library). The VCL was a wrapper around Win32, which had some great strengths but also really frustrating weaknesses e.g. extremely poor/non-existent layout management, poor support for typography and no support for styling or branding. There were many positive aspects of course. Microsoft gave you VB or C++, both with Win32 again. The C++ developer experience was horrid. VB was at least a scripting language with garbage collection, but, it was also constrained by the fact that B stood for "Beginners" so Microsoft were very reluctant to fix any of its legacy or add more powerful features. Compared to that situation, scripting languages and especially Perl had some massive advantages: 1. Ran on UNIX/Big Iron which is where all the best hardware and databases could be found. Lots of devs liked UNIX because it was CLI and developer oriented. 2. Unashamedly designed for experts with tons of powerful features, quality of life stuff like integrated regex, garbage collection, proper stack traces, error logs you could view via telnet within seconds etc. 2. CPAN provided an ever growing repository of open source libraries, instantly accessible, for free! On Windows there were very few libraries, they were mostly quite expensive and closed source, no easy way to discover them (pre-Google) and only C++/Delphi devs could write them. VB was sort of a consumer-only language. Open source culture started with RMS at the MIT AI lab and so was very UNIX centric for a long time. Arguably it still is. Really, it's hard to overstate how revolutionary proper garbage collection + CPAN was. GC is a force multiplier and CPAN is the granddaddy of all the open source library repositories we take for granted today. Imagine how unproductive you'd be without them. The big downside was that Perl had no UI libraries and didn't really run on Windows. So how do you use it to write apps for normal people? Then Netscape started adding interactivity features to the web and it was all totally text based. Text was Perl's forte! Add the <form> tag, CGI, HTTP and now you're cooking with gas. Bye bye hateful 0xC00005 Access Violation errors and useless bug reports like "I clicked a button and the app disappeared". The web was a huge step back for users, who went from having pretty sophisticated GUIs with fast table views, menus, shortcut keys, context menus, Office integration, working copy/paste, instant UI response etc to ... well, the web. But often users will suffer through that if it makes their devs more productive because all they really care about are features and competitive advantage. The web was crude but it let people escape the Windows ecosystem to one with open source + GC + pro languages + big iron UNIX.