[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 06:21:11PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

> > >  Now yes, these are the machines that you mentioned...but, for a
> > > commercial product, what else would you really want to run it on??
> >
> >MIPS/Irix, HP/UX/PA-RISC, Tru64/VMS/Alpha, Itanium/Linux,
> >PPC64/Linux/zOS and perhaps just maybe NetBSD.  Not saying Java doesn't
> >run well on those, just that they are possible platforms for a
> >commercial product.
> 
>   Well, not for *this* commercial product.  It'd probably run fine on 
> those platforms too, but we never had a reason to try it.

Well you originally said *a* commercial product, not *that* commercial
product.  I suspect that Java would be great for things like backup
clients, network monitor clients, etc, and in those cases, I'd want it
to run on every single unixy platform that is out there with people
buying software for it.  It would suck to have to rewrite in a different
language rather than just porting a C program to support a potentially
big client on an higher end unix platform than you used to support.
 
> >On a side note, Limewire was almost decent.
> 
>   For a while, yes...but it succumbed to bloat.  "Hey, let's use EVERY 
> SINGLE FEATURE of Swing!"

I haven't actually used it for awhile.  My definition of almost was that
it was sluggish, but usable on a P166.  Call me unreasonable, but I
think that there is no excuse for there to be many programs (making a
big excuse for games only) that won't run well on such a machine.
 
> >That said, a mediocre programmer who follows the guidelines would 
> >likely
> >turn out faster executing code than a mediocre C programmer.  Real life
> >doesn't seem to bare this out, but in theory using sort routines and
> >data structures written by the best minds should be faster than doing
> >your own poor implementations of them.  The only platform that seem to
> >even come close to living this out is Squeak and other smalltalks
> >though, and exactly how much real world stuff do we see come from 
> >there?
> >
> >I still maintain that for the majority of the world, C is the wrong
> >language.  A language that comes bundled with an appropriate assortment
> >of data structures for the mediocre programmer is much better.  VB (at
> >least as of versions 5 and 6) don't meet this description.
> 
>   Perhaps.  But mediocre programmers should really find a different 
> career or hobby.  But I think C is suitable for a great many more 
> things than you [apparently] think it's suited for.

I wonder if I've spent more time on the bottom of the pond (at least
recently) than you.  Trying to help fellow CS students was certainly eye
opening, as is talking with Deb.

I figure that if we can figure out how to make tools so that mediocre
programmers can do a competent job for particularly boring corporate
jobs (reporting comes to mind, simple forms driven data base stuff does
as well), then that will free more good programmers to work on more
interesting things.