General talk about software patterns

[Pascal Costanza <pascal AT p-cos.net>]

On 27 Oct 2004, at 7:23, Chris Finlayson wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> Be it right or wrong, the best product technically doesn't always win. 
>  We
> know this.  The "us versus them" attitude will do nothing to solve this
> (management is stupid, we know better, etc....)

The so-called "us versus them" attitude is inevitable. In a capitalist 
world, the guys with the money have more power than the guys without 
the money. We should acknowledge that reality instead of denying it.

> America and the world has a long way to go.

Please don't say "America and the world", at least not until you have 
gotten rid of George W. Bush. This gives me the creeps.

> Likewise, be it right or wrong, Sun and Microsoft have developed 
> end-to-end
> enterprise systems to cater to the masses.  Even if we assume that 
> today
> someone came out with the "best" programming language ever as judged 
> by a
> panel of experts, it'll go nowhere if it doesn't have a well-stated 
> business
> case and a vision for the future.

Talking about the future: Read Paul Graham's "The Hundred-Year 
Language" at http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

> I'm not a Microsoft
> evangelist by any means, I don't think they're extraordinarily
> groundbreaking in research, but I do think they're good at filtering 
> out
> what people have already done, picking and choosing the best-of-breed 
> ideas,
> and implementing them in a unified system.

No, they're not. They have just been clever at taking advantage of 
several mistakes IBM made a few decades ago. Everything else follows 
from that. Their technology is mostly crap.

> The higher level individuals who are
> in charge of making technology decisions can only make their decision 
> based
> upon how well the problem and vision is described to them.

This is the gist of the problem: Technical decisions made by 
non-technical people.


Pascal

--
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