[TriLUG] Ford Drops Windows for their Sync System

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 26 Feb 2014 13:02:24 -0500
Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 02/26/2014 11:37 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
> > On Wed, 26 Feb 2014 01:24:53 -0500
> > Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On 02/24/2014 03:29 PM, William Sutton wrote:
> >>> Netscape -- polluted their own codebase so badly that they opened
> >>> it up to open source developers to clean up the mess.  they
> >>> scrapped it and made Mozilla, now Firefox, which has itself become
> >>> a bloated mess. WordPerfect -- quality product that Novell bears
> >>> some additional responsibility for killing
> >>>
> >>> I'll also toss Borland out there.  People I know who used
> >>> Borland's compilers tell me they were superior to Microsoft...
> >>> but Borland's long been out of that business.
> >>
> >> Wasn't Borland a bit pricey back when?? Ric
> >
> > No, the pricey part came later. Back in the 1980's Borland compilers
> > were between $29 and $69. In the mid 1990's, which is the time this
> > discussion pertains to, Borland compilers were, IIRC, around a
> > hundred bucks, and in every case less than their Microsoft
> > counterpart.
> >
> > Borland as a big bux wannabe big iron glass house fetish came after
> > Microsoft had demolished the Borland business model with
> > (innovation | antitrust).
> >
> > By the way, if you're at all interested in Borland, check out
> > FreePascal and Lazarus. Both free software, both should be available
> > with your package manager. FreePascal is pretty much a Borland
> > Pascal workalike, and Lazarus is pretty much a Delphi workalike.
> 
> 
> I haven't messed around with code since they took the line numbers
> out of BASIC. <grins> Back when I was typing in games from Creative 
> Computing and struggling to get them to run on an Apple ][. Then,
> "file sharing" became "the thing". Yoho! :) Ric

Ric,

You should revisit code. It's *vastly* improved. Python is a miracle
with which you can do almost anything. C is much better these days, and
there's much more C documentation to make it easy. Bash scripts can do
so much with so little. I've used the bash kill command plus fifos to
implement interprocess communication. There are all sorts of new
languages (Haskell, Scheme and the like) that are *completely*
different from C derived languages like Perl, Python and Ruby. A
language called Lua is like a Comp Sci course in a download. Frameworks
like Rails and Django make web app development easier. 

I don't do it because I don't have a smart phone, but today it's even
fairly easy to make smartphone apps.

Today, there's something for everyone in programming.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance