[sclug] Upgrading and languages (was: Who has the key to your Vista PC?)

[Will Dickson]

ed wrote:

> the manufacturing process is expensive, but why are we upgrading
> anyway? why doesnt software become *MORE* efficient with time, rather
> than less? seems daft to me, programmers get more skilful over time,
> why don't they write with c more than with c#? surely it's better to
> become more sophisticated rather than less.
> 
> probably boils down to money..

One tends not to notice it, because the changes are incremental, but all 
that extra weight is actually there for a reason.

Concrete example: a long time ago (before I saw the light :-), I bought 
VC++ 6. At the time, I considered it a) a pretty good IDE; and b) 
HUUUGE! - it was the biggest application on my box by far, although I 
might have had 1 or 2 games which had bigger overall footprints.

And then, quite recently, I rebuilt my GameOS installation on a new box, 
and reinstalled exactly the same VC++ 6 as part of the deal (I still 
have a small amount of GameOS code to support). Results: a) "good 
*grief*, how did I ever tolerate this featureless POS?" and b) "is that 
it? Where's the rest of it?"

These two are interconnected!


As to the languages thing (just a sec while I get my asbestos suit on):

- C is very powerful at the lowest levels. If you're writing kernels, 
device drivers, or other Really Wild Stuff, you use C because the only 
alternative is assembler. Pretty much nothing else cuts it.

- C is bloody awful for writing large, reasonably run-of-the-mill 
application code. You don't need its bit-twiddling abilities here. What 
you do need is plenty of abstractive power (so you can get the job done 
inside the silly schedule which manglement have just handed you) and the 
ability to eg. not have to spend half your mental run-time worrying 
about low-level memory management. (See "buffer overrun".) That's the 
sort of menial labour which, in most cases, computers with well-written 
language runtimes (which yes, probably *are* written in C - these fall 
under "Really Wild Stuff" for the purposes of this argument) are a lot 
better at than humans.

- In other words, you need a high-level language. There are plenty 
around, but C is not one of them and never was - it was defined as a 
"middle-level language", somewhere between the high-level languages 
proper, and low-level assembler code. IMNSHO the mission creep which C 
has experienced over the years, as it spread from stuff it was good for 
(writing most of unix) via stuff it was reasonably good for 
("middleware" in a very broad sense) to application-level code for which 
it was never intended, is one of the major reasons why we've all seen so 
much losing, bug-infested application code over the years.

> 
> i'm sure we're all working in our favourite wm right now, for me, xfce,
> loads of functionality. no beryl or anything running, i like it 2d, but
> its and infinitely more efficient way to work than in explorer.exe,
> which is limited.

Which reminds me - does anyone know of a way to do a GUI-compatible su 
under XUbuntu to change to a user other than root? I've tried several 
mechanisms, and they all allow me to launch GUI apps as root with no 
problem, but won't work if I try to launch said GUI apps as some other 
user. This is a bit of a pain, since XUbuntu would be ideal for our 
various servers if only I could get this to work.
> 
> the users will notice only that there are some
> interface changes and the functionality really is just about the same as
> it was in 2000.

I'm wondering how long it'll take for DirectX 10-only games to come out? 
The only way I'd get Vista would be if either nVidia stop making 
Windows2000 drivers to satisfy my OTT-graphics-card habit, or if some 
really, really must-have game came out which was Vista-only. I've 
managed to avoid downgrading from W2K to XP so far; with a bit of luck 
I'll be able to dodge Vista as well :-)

Will.