4 ms·

I hear you, but I don’t think “the industry” is anything like as rational or strategic or organised as your theory suggests. What I see as a much more powerful

by mft_ 1y ago

I hear you, but I don’t think “the industry” is anything like as rational or strategic or organised as your theory suggests. What I see as a much more powerful prevailing undercurrent, in everything from Linux not making it on the desktop (next year!) to dependency management in Python to awful documentation in so many projects, is that smart programmers cater to themselves, and there are too few incentives to cater for the proles who aren’t quite as capable or deeply embedded in computer science. In short, it’s Hanlon’s razor: you’re seeing conspiracy while I just see incompetence.

anthk 1y ago
No, is not incompetence. Contrary to MS, FLOSS Unixen were designed as a client/server role, and with these Unixen with easy licenses, you can decouple your core and your UI and manage your software anywhere, be it from terminal, a TUI client, HTML, a QT client, TCL/TK, your smartphone... Try that with MS Windows Server licenses. Simply, the network won. And, for the 'integrated' guys... MSOffice and VBA are silos were the data often got mangled, losing billions in bioinformatics, for instanced. Having the markup, the data, the input, output and reports in the same file, that's the recipe for a disaster. And it did happen. As I stated, Unix established a clear pipeline, transforming data sequentially and having each step of the process either recordable or trivially decoupleable. Smart people would just begin with plain text files and format them once they are finished. Ditto with spreadsheets. CVS/TSV first, data transforms and function should come later, ideally separating the input file from the output. Reading to print/end user documents should always be under a PDF/DJVU format, never to be edited, but universally viewed in the same way no matter the OS. Period. PDF's/DJVU's should be the target format, either from Excel, or Word or even PPT's. Oh, these format don't support inline videos nor macros or whatever potentially risky function to crap out your, you know, valuable outputed data? That's even better. Data should have been precalculated and presented long ago.
- mft_ 1y ago
  Honestly, I’m not following the full thread of your argument. But what I do take, is that you think the UNIX world is just much better organised than the alternative; and anyone who doesn’t understand that and isn’t thriving in that environment… is the problem? And you don’t see the problem with this line of thinking?

by mft_ 1y ago

anthk 1y ago

No, is not incompetence. Contrary to MS, FLOSS Unixen were designed as a client/server role, and with these Unixen with easy licenses, you can decouple your core and your UI and manage your software anywhere, be it from terminal, a TUI client, HTML, a QT client, TCL/TK, your smartphone... Try that with MS Windows Server licenses. Simply, the network won. And, for the 'integrated' guys... MSOffice and VBA are silos were the data often got mangled, losing billions in bioinformatics, for instanced. Having the markup, the data, the input, output and reports in the same file, that's the recipe for a disaster. And it did happen. As I stated, Unix established a clear pipeline, transforming data sequentially and having each step of the process either recordable or trivially decoupleable. Smart people would just begin with plain text files and format them once they are finished. Ditto with spreadsheets. CVS/TSV first, data transforms and function should come later, ideally separating the input file from the output. Reading to print/end user documents should always be under a PDF/DJVU format, never to be edited, but universally viewed in the same way no matter the OS. Period. PDF's/DJVU's should be the target format, either from Excel, or Word or even PPT's. Oh, these format don't support inline videos nor macros or whatever potentially risky function to crap out your, you know, valuable outputed data? That's even better. Data should have been precalculated and presented long ago.

mft_ 1y ago
Honestly, I’m not following the full thread of your argument. But what I do take, is that you think the UNIX world is just much better organised than the alternative; and anyone who doesn’t understand that and isn’t thriving in that environment… is the problem? And you don’t see the problem with this line of thinking?