Re: New RDBMS implementation

In message <409a1035.1082786_at_news.wanadoo.es>, Alfredo Novoa <alfredo_at_ncs.es> writes
>> One takes advantage of source code not by changing the OS but
>>by having the possibility of doing that.
>
>But it has not practical value in almost all cases.
>
>You can count with your fingers the people that touch the Linux
>kernel.

The point is not that they DO, it is that they CAN.

What are you going to do when your program blows up and, try as you might, you can't find the bug. That is, until you realise that it's blowing up inside Windows because of a bug in an MS-supplied routine.

Microsoft has a long history of causing havoc because they couldn't be bothered to fix something if it didn't cause too many problems - indeed they have a long history of deliberate bugs *intended* to cause problems (which of course there's no way they'd fix - DOS4 and Lotus 1-2-3, Windows 3 and DR-Dos, WFWG or Office 95 and WordPerfect, Netscape and Win98 and that's just off the top of my head!).

The fact that you HAVE the source means that you CAN track down the bug. If you've got a product worth millions of (insert currency unit here), that's worth its weight in gold. Your associates are not going to be impressed if you fail to deliver, and if that failure is down to a Microsoft bug, there's no reason for them to be sympathetic - although I hope they would be, before telling you to ditch MS and use something else!

Oh - as for IDEs - the best (and most productive) IDE is a pen and a sheet of paper. It's my experience (and there are a fair number of studies that back that up) that says that IDEs actively hinder the development of discipline in a developer. And worse - "one IDE fits all" is going to piss the hell out of some people - chances are they will be your best developers! For example, linux has several IDEs, but the most popular (and the one that developers don't think of as an IDE) is plain old EMACS.

There's a BIG difference between "idiot-friendly" and "user-friendly". Microsoft software is very firmly in the "idiot friendly" camp, and as a result it is pretty "experience hostile". EMACS may be a pain in the rear end to learn, but once you start using it heavily, you suddenly start to realise (and appreciate) why it works the way it does - it really is a user-friendly piece of software (so long as you remember the saying "Unix IS user friendly. It's just picky over who its friends are" :-)

Cheers,
Wol

-- 
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999