[Info-vax] portable sequential file formats (was: Re: Couple of questions on VMS -> world)

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 18 March 2015 01:22:16 UTC, johnso... at gmail.com  wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 17, 2015 at 1:00:04 PM UTC-4, li... at openmailbox.org wrote:
> 
> > Agreed. I don't understand how anybody can use Linux or most UNIX in
> > production for anything. 
> 
> But clearly it's been done and continues to be done. At quite large scales too.
> I think of organizations such as Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Google. Perhaps
> you are focusing on the wrong things.
> 
> > But it's still UNIX so it suffers from the same lack of naming conventions 
> > and where Sun hasn't fixed [...]
> 
> While annoying at times, it's really not a deal breaker. It's at most a temporary
> speed bump for some. 
> 
> > And they're all based on C which is the root of all evil- it's
> > not *if* something bad is going to happen it's just when and how often.
> 
> I think you need to separate your disgust at elements of the standard C 
> library from that of the language itself.
> 
> EJ


Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc are presentation-centric read-mostly
applications, on the whole. Nobody cares much if they work properly
or not, so long as they're mostly there most of the time.

Equally, nobody notices much if they provide wrong data or lose data
from time to time. These are the outfits who are the target market for
HP/Foxconn's Cloudline disposable/nonmanageable/nondiagnosable servers.

These well known outfits buy lots of kit but how representative are they
of the rest of the market? If you want a disposable webfacing
presentation-centric public setup, why not leave it to e.g. Amazon AWS
and the like, and forget about the hardware altogether?

But if you want a traditional transactional setup where data
availability and integrity and security are still things that matter,
there may be better options.

One size does not fit all?


"separate your disgust at elements of the standard C library from that
of the language itself. "

Lots of folk could benefit from doing that.