Re: Trend towards platform specific languages

[Larry Bolhuis <lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> ... Others, like Microsloth, use market leverage, intentional 
> incompatibility, and intentional dead-ends (anybody remember Win32s?) 
> to suppress competition and keep user expectations low.
For example I run the Timing and Scoring system for my daughters high 
school swim meets. $55,000 worth of hardware and software. The program 
runs on Windoze and crashes routinely throughout the meets.  'Illegal 
function call in &(*&^(*$# " and such.  We must stop the meet and 
restart the program. The developers have 'fixed' the problem by leaving 
behind bread-crumbs so that upon restart it knows it was in timing mode 
and which event is next so it automatically goes there. (A big time 
saver for those frequent crashes!)  This system has been running for 
FOUR years (this is my first running it). The developers say it is 
excellent now, nearly bug free! (gasp choke!) The swim coach agrees that 
it is much better, BUT.....  Last night it cost a swimmer a 
disqualification because the program crashed as the swimmers stepped up. 
I called to the meet official to wait but he didn't say 'step down' so 
when one girl fell into the pool (the #1 swimmer in the event) she got 
the DQ.  I argued that it shouldn't be her fault a) that the computer 
crashed and b) that he didn't have them step down. No matter. (Note: 
Swimmer was on the opposing team.)
After the second meed I was ranting to the developer about how bad it 
was for code like this to blow up 8 or more times in a 2 hour meet! 
"Unacceptable" I said. "Is it 4th year beta code?" and on and on I went. 
After about 10 minutes of ragging on the guy I realized the coach wasn't 
saying anything and I thought perhaps I had overstepped my meager 
authority. So I stopped and asked "Am I out of line here?"   He just 
smiled and said, "Glad to see at least one other person in this world 
who doesn't think Windows programs crashing every 15 minutes is 
acceptable. Keep going!"  Later he said "You work on computers right? 
Don't you deal with all day long?"  I explained the iSeries. Next 
question: "Can we get one of these programs to that run on an 
iSeries?"   :-))