Comments on: Lazy Reading for 2022/01/16

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 16:27:38 +0000

In reply to Felix.

Yeah, that’s the trade-off: reinventing the wheel vs having the existing wheels overwhelm new development. On the other hand, you could argue everyone should still be using nvi, but it’s the jump to new platforms that brought new editors. For instance.

I mentioned that cause I loved Programmer’s Editor (Pe) on BeOS, and BBEdit on MacOS, and those were very distinct to the operating system they ran on. Heck, vi/emacs are Unixish all the way through.

By: Felix

Felix — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 04:55:16 +0000

I don’t see many people developing native apps for Haiku. I was hoping to get into it, and never got around to even installing the OS. And I’ve been following its development for a long time now.

Besides, do we really have to keep reinventing the wheel by making new apps for the same tasks on every single operating system out there? Don’t we have anything better to do with our time and energy? Whether we’re talking personal energy or electricity.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 23:40:56 +0000

I know what X11 compatibility gets you; the issue is that it can squeeze out native app development. It keeps your own platform from developing anything unique or better.

This was an early question for BeOS; I think Jean Louis-Gassee talked about it at one point, but I don’t have a link handy to show.

By: Felix

Felix — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 14:21:00 +0000

X11 compatibility means you can port a mind-boggling amount of software with minimal effort. X11 works. It’s not perfect, sure, but it works. We really, really don’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time. And we definitely don’t need to make it square just because round is kinda boring by now. Some things are supposed to be boring.