[LINK] Microsoft is dead

[Rick Welykochy]

Paul Brooks wrote:

> Then I noticed iTunes had gone and duplicated every single blasted song 
> and movie under its own directory tree, filled the disk and generally 
> made a mess - not to mention requiring a RAM footprint and CPU cycles 
> that would embarass an elephant while it was operating.

iTunes and iPhoto rely on symbolic (or perhaps hard) links on Unix
to spin their magic. The links allow multiple instances of files to
exist in the file system without duplicating the file space.

Unfortunately such links are not available in Windows* and thus
to simulate the native Unix behaviour, actual copies are made of
multimedia files. A gross waste and a very bad deisgn decision, imho.


*IIRC, there is a hairbrained scheme inside newer version of Windows
to do symlinking; I read somethiing about it a while back and it looked
real strange to my Unix brain :) and no, "shortcuts" on the Desktop
do not accomplish the same function.



> I learnt much the same lesson in a past life as a programmer 
> designer/coder - you can write horrible spaghetti unmaintainable 
> programs in any language, you can write beautiful  self-documenting 
> modular object-oriented marvels in any language - its not about the 
> language, its about the individual doing the writing.

You must admit, though, that different languages support different
paradigms. It is probably way too much work to attempt a you-beaut
O-O system in FORTRAN 77 for example. Even trying to write neat and
clean object *based* code in C can hardly match the elegance (some
would say nausea) of C++.

If a computer language does not support a certain paradigm, it is
usually a wasted effort attempting to simulate that paradigm.

Example: have you ever seriously tried to use an exception handling
system (throw,catch using macros ... urgh) in C that accurately
tracks heap-created objects and unwinds the stack properly? Insane!
So error prone and dangerous that I would never use what I was
experimenting with in production code. Whereas in C++, perl, python,
and similar languages, exceptions are used all the time for error
processing.


cheers
rickw


-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

Security wins over ease of use every time.
      -- rick welykochy