[Liverpool] Way back into technical topics

Thu Mar 10 13:48:16 UTC 2011

Thanks Dan. In turn, I agree with your technical points :-)

Starting a bit of an offshoot post here: I've many times thought about 
the merits of minimising learning efforts when it comes to the IT 
industry in general, and to software in particular. Keeping in mind that 
we all work (or are connected with) an industry with massive amounts of 
knowledge, and an extremely rapid rate of change. Keeping up with what 
is going on, and becoming an expert in one's niche of IT is a massive 
intellectual (and possibly financial) effort most of the time.

Thus I have often been preoccupied with evaluating tools (both software 
and hardware) based on the likelihood that their benefits will be as 
long lasting as possible. One example off the top of my head is learning 
as much as possible solid principles of networking, as opposed to 
software and hardware from a particular vendor. Some technologies, due 
to their implementation, politics, which company is behind them, how 
widely they are accepted, their degree of interoperability - are more 
prone then others to existing for a long time in the marketplace. Some 
much, much longer then others. Then again, some skills are more 
transferrable, others are far more specific and only useful to their 
narrow field of application.

This is not exactly a question - as those who have read so far might 
have gathered :-) More along the lines of personal musings. If anybody 
else has taken time to think about these sort of things - feel free to 
contribute their opinion.

I remember some articles about Cobol and some other "older" programming 
languages - and how some "old-timers" are still making a decent living 
out of programming with them. I would call that a really generous return 
on their intellectual investment - specially compared with some web 
programmers - who were required to have 10 years experience in 
technologies which are only few years old at best - and might be ousted 
by something new in another few years.

I'm pretty sure there are other examples of old or new technologies 
which either have lasted, or are likely to last and be useful a long 
time (at least longer then others).

Sebastian

On 03/10/2011 12:52 PM, Dan Lynch wrote:
> I can't argue with your points there Sebastian, the future of Qt is
> uncertain right now. Nokia has already sold the commercial re-licensing
> business for Qt to another company. I'm not sure what will happen with
> the rest, it could well be forked. It's a completely Open Source project
> now and they relicensed after the historic problems with FSF that led to
> Gnome in the first place. I'm not sure the commercial licensing
> implications for you and it makes sense to avoid it if these are
> commercial apps. I'd have to look into the legal side further.
>
> Speaking purely on technical merit, I've been told by many great
> developers that Qt 4 is a brilliant tool kit to work with. Especially
> cross platform. I actually agree with your political points and it's a
> shame this red tape gets in the way of development. Good luck!
>
> Dan
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Sebastian Arcus <shop at open-t.co.uk
> <mailto:shop at open-t.co.uk>> wrote:
>
>     Thanks Dan. To be honest, I haven't even bothered with QT at all,
>     for political reasons, if nothing else. It use to be with Trolltech,
>     then with Nokia, now somewhere in the middle with no clear answer as
>     to who is going to be behind it. Nokia is now going with WinPho as a
>     platform - so it is even less clear how much of an interest they
>     will have in QT. I guess they will just sell it to some other
>     company, which might just cause a fork - and so and so on. Then it
>     use to have the issue of non-commercial license with funny
>     restrictions along their commercial license (I believe you couldn't
>     build commercial apps based on the open source version - which is
>     not a problem with GTK - don't know what the current licensing is).
>     I prefer a project which is firmly in the hands of the community -
>     instead of being shepherded by a commercial company or another which
>     changes it's mind every few years in terms of what it wants to do
>     with it.
>
>     Well, that's just my opinion anyway,
>
>     Sebastian
>
>
>
>     On 03/10/2011 11:57 AM, Dan Lynch wrote:
>
>         Most of my desktop development on Linux has just been with
>         pyGTK, but I
>         can't tell you how useful that is on Windows.
>
>         I just thought I'd make a quick mention of Qt 4 as a possible
>         alternative. It runs very well on all platforms, though I don't
>         know if
>         it translates to native controls. Lots of developers rave about it.
>         Might be worth a look.
>
>         That's my 2 cents, I'll let you get back to the complicated stuff :)
>
>         Dan
>
>
>
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