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On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 12:32:32AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote |
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> Is it like perl? Support every possible way to do something if it |
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> remotely makes sense to do it, no matter how bizarre the syntax? |
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The (d)evolution of perl reminds me of what's happened to Firefox, |
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GNOME, and KDE. To paraphrase the emacs joke, perl is a mediocre |
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operating system that lacks a lightweight text-manipulation utility. |
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WTF does every simple program try to become an OS? |
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* The original "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" PERL has |
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become a pseudo-OS. Believe it or not, it was a lightweight practical |
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text-parsing and report-generating utility back in the day. |
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* Netscape (under AOL) aimed at becoming a pseudo-OS on top of Windows. |
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We know how that turned out. |
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* I'm old enough to remember the days of the "Phoenix" betas (later |
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Firebird then Firefox). A lean/mean fast web-browser. Now it's |
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turned into a bloated monstrosity, complete with relational database, |
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that's being used as the basis for Firefox-OS phones. |
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* Google's Chrome/Chromium came from Chrome-OS, so it's not too |
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surprising that it demands dbus and udev to build. |
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* I remember when KDE and GNOME were zippy on machines with 64 megs of |
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RAM. The sad part is that the GNOME desktop had more features then |
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than it has now as it moves towards becoming GNOME-OS. |
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-- |
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Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org> |
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I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications |
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