tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11788780.post8469701707035131970..comments2023-12-29T13:22:33.104-08:00Comments on JJinuxLand: A Blog Post on Excel, 4x4s, Moonshots, and General Purpose Softwarejjinuxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03270879497119114175noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11788780.post-49509852117214789172014-07-02T19:56:12.691-07:002014-07-02T19:56:12.691-07:00> I've followed your blog for several years...> I've followed your blog for several years now, but this is my first comment.<br /><br />Thanks.<br /><br />> Marshall McLuhan remarked that the content of a new medium is always an older medium.<br /><br />I think it's a good point, but I'm not sure how it answers the question.<br /><br />> So it may be with our time; among the crowd of ideas all around us, we cannot know which few will be influential decades hence.<br /><br />Agreed.<br /><br />> My own candidate for most significant development of the past two decades in software is the free and open-source movement.<br /><br />Agreed.<br /><br />> But the FOSS movement has shown that not only will people donate their valuable time and effort, but that they often beat commercial vendors in quality, responsiveness, documentation, and every other measure.<br /><br />Actually, I think most programmers who work on open source software do so as a part of their paid work.<br /><br />Furthermore, I've unfortunately come to the conclusion that FOSS and quality are completely orthogonal. Sometimes the FOSS is better. Sometimes it's worse.<br /><br />> I can think of no precedents for such a phenomenon.<br /><br />Art and academic papers are like that. I think blogging is becoming that way.jjinuxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03270879497119114175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11788780.post-78109189574902241722014-06-09T12:05:27.350-07:002014-06-09T12:05:27.350-07:00Hi,
I've followed your blog for several years...Hi,<br /><br />I've followed your blog for several years now, but this is my first comment. I rarely comment anywhere, but this one is too compelling to leave unanswered. There's too much here to treat properly in a single comment, so I'll focus on just a couple of things.<br /><br />Why are there no more spreadsheet-type general-purpose apps? Marshall McLuhan remarked that the content of a new medium is always an older medium. Print 'contains' manuscript, which in turn contains speech. By that reasoning, word processing contains (we might say 'virtualizes') typewriter typing, powerpoint contains the old acetate overhead slides, and so forth. Excel contains the green ledger books my dad used as an accountant. The pre-PC, pre-Internet world provides only a limited number of candidates for transfer from the physical world into software.<br /><br />As for programming, think of all the fundamental concepts that appeared in the 1950s, for example, functional programming, COBOL, (anyone remember APL?), context-free grammars, and regular expressions. All of these happened when computers of any type were accessible to a tiny group of people, so these ideas could not be 'big' for a long time. So it may be with our time; among the crowd of ideas all around us, we cannot know which few will be influential decades hence.<br /><br />My own candidate for most significant development of the past two decades in software is the free and open-source movement. When I started in computing, in the 1980s, software patents were already being talked about. In the debate it was presumed by all sides that, without some form of reward, software would not be developed or even maintained. It's hard to imagine now, but it seemed self-evident at the time. <br /><br />But the FOSS movement has shown that not only will people donate their valuable time and effort, but that they often beat commercial vendors in quality, responsiveness, documentation, and every other measure. I would suggest that this is miraculous, and suggests that software is somehow different from other areas of human endeavor; its practitioners so love the process of creation that they are called to do it for pleasure and personal expression. I can think of no precedents for such a phenomenon.<br /><br />So perhaps it's not specific technical ideas, but rather the cultural context made possible by the decades of accumulated technical context.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com