colinstrickland

4 ms·

1.
by colinstrickland 9mo ago
Thanks for detailed reply. Yes, the marketing budget for Java was unmatched, but to my eye they were in retreat towards the Enterprise datacentre by 2001. I don't think the Python foundation had launched until 2001. Amazon was migrati
2.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
Do you not think O'Reilly Associates fits some of that role? It seemed like Perl had more commercial backing compared to the other scripting languages if anything at that point. Python and JavaScript were picked up by Google, but later
3.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
Although Perl auto flattens lists by default, which isn't particularly lisp like.
4.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
> Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you? Do you not? The pace of anthropic/Claude tool development is p
5.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
My naive assumption is that WebKit would give a route towards blink and more mainstream compatibility. Gecko was a perfectly defensible choice in the Maemo era, the landscape just moved. That's my point, Jolla sailfish are coupled to o
6.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
(Author) Sorry you had a poor experience, yes my blog "engine" is a hacked together POS that barely works, with hand written CSS, that was mostly built before the mobile first era, I have just tweaked it to work somewhat on portra
7.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
The platform always suffered from two big architectural missteps. 1 - the native browser being an old firefox/gecko fork embedded into their own UI framework, giving a poor performance and dated compatibility quirks 2 - the android emu
8.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
they did indeed have a crowdfunded tablet that went wrong in supply chain, and basically bankrupted the company. Many funders lost out. That's unfortunate, and perhaps might have been avoidable with better organisation. Absolutely it s
9.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
I don't remember dselect _downloading_ dependencies, but it may have been capable of resolving the full graph - AFAIK .deb always included dependencies
10.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
I think you're right about rpm and yum, actually, my memory failed me. (I was always a Debian user, so didn't have as much direct RedHat experience). I remember yum being really slow when it first arrived too.
11.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
(author here) Thanks! Almost all of those lessons are much easier with 30+ years of hindsight and counter-examples, of course.
12.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
Yes, I am agreeing with you, whilst adding some detail.
13.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
Debian had binary packages with dependencies via dpkg from maybe 1994. Automatic recursive downloads, with apt (apt-get) were much later, around 1998. Rpm was launched in 1997. It's hard to remember really, but automatic downloads woul
14.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
Sun also tried, and failed, to bring to market, a microprocessor architecture for running Java on metal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC
15.
by colinstrickland 10mo ago
chunks of Amazon were still in Perl while we were building out IMDb.
16.
by colinstrickland 11mo ago
video editing, multiple projects
17.
by colinstrickland 5y ago
not really. They suggested it as a viable option for third party access, because they initially wanted to keep native apps as a first-party advantage, and not open the device unbundled software. It has been tried a few times though, particu
18.
by colinstrickland 6y ago
Apple aquired NeXT and completely reinvented their organisation based on that.
19.
by colinstrickland 7y ago
if i recall correctly, if the computer is off the return value is undefined.
20.
by colinstrickland 7y ago
It also has an `IsComputerOn` system call.
21.
by colinstrickland 7y ago
wow, this list is bringing back all the memories. You're right, there was a short wave of enthusiasm, and some apps which were actually very innovative for the time. I remembered that it was actually used in some pro audio and lighting
22.
by colinstrickland 7y ago
That's a coincidence this surfacing right now. There must be something in the air. I was an enthusiastic BeOS user back when it was a thing (ironically, I switched to it because I thought NEXTSTEP didn't have much of a future left
23.
by colinstrickland 10y ago
yeah, i'm British, and I kind of mean 'cool kids' to be a slightly self-deprecating ironic phrase. I meant that all the people I knew that were doing more interesting things seemed to be doing perl, so I followed that path. F
24.
by colinstrickland 10y ago
I wouldn't claim to be a good programmer, but I would point out that back then my exposure to PHP was PHP version 3, and version 4 was only just getting established.
25.
by colinstrickland 10y ago
hard to say. Salary was market rate. Stock was 2001-era amzn, which wasn't a bad deal
26.
by colinstrickland 10y ago
I'm not sure about better, but it was certainly a very different set of disciplines
27.
by colinstrickland 10y ago
I'm one of the original developers and the primary author of the IMDb boards system, started way back in 2001. I wrote up my thoughts here - https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/internet/imdb-boards-no-more
28.
by colinstrickland 15y ago
Well if we're being pedants about it, then the kernel is XNU ( http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1699.24.23/ )
29.
Retrocomputing the New Scientist magazine Enigma puzzle(jimpulse.blogspot.com)
24 points by colinstrickland 15y ago|1 comments
30.
by colinstrickland 16y ago
I spent a year or so trying to help a company I was working with hire experienced perl developers to work on existing code. Pretty much all of the candidates were way below the standard required. I came to the conclusion that this was proba

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