[Info-vax] September 6, 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now on VSI website

[IanD]

On Sunday, September 11, 2016 at 10:07:28 PM UTC+10, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2016-09-10 14:59:40 +0000, David Froble said:
> 
> > If what one wants is *ix, then why not just use *ix?
> 
> Ayup.    That's what more than a few from the OpenVMS user base have done, too.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

Sadly, your right - many have gone...

The issue is we are trying to bring OpenVMS forward after years of neglect

Linux has won, it's as simple as that. MS are second fiddle in the server space, OpenVMS is way down the ranks

I keep hearing about gnu and I use some of the nix tools like awk and when I can be bothered, I resort to the likes of Python to get things down but what I see is OpenVMS still insisting on being OpenVMS and nothing more

Is gnu released as part of OpenVMS now? Isn't it a separate download? Why? Why isn't it part of the standard OpenVMS distribution and install? 

If the majority of the world is linux now, then why are we not doing everything possible to make OpenVMS inviting for the majority to give OpenVMS a go?

If tcp/ip wasn't treated like a second class citizen it too might have been better integrated into OpenVMS over the years instead of the piecemeal implementation it is today

It starts with an embracing attitude and then flows from there. 

As long as people want OpenVMS to remain OpenVMS from days gone by then it's going to fade away into further obscurity. I'm not advocating OpenVMS becoming linux, but why not embrace the best linux has to offer? What's the harm? More functionality surely equates to better business solutions in quicker time-frames?

I'd like to see all the good nix tools installed as default in OpenVMS and added to the documentation. If I had known about things like awk when I started out with OpenVMS I would have used it a hell of a lot more over the years

Having spent a little bit of time learning some of the aspects of awk has eliminated the need to write some pita dcl scripts. Awk is pretty dam quick too. For data that in column format awk can be very handy

It's about being productive and some of those nix tools are pretty dam helpful in knocking out solutions and should be part of every OpenVMS users repitior but are often not because they are not even part of a standard OpenVMS install and you will not see them in the documentation either - which is really silly IMO, OpenVMS should ship with as many helpful tools as it can

I didn't realise the nix diff tool was superior to OpenVMS's. Time to have a look I think

Food for thought. MS are racing like crazy to add nix related aspects to windows, including the bash shell of all things. Even MS with it's monopolistic attitude of old has turned over and is working with linux rather than trying to go against it, time for OpenVMS to do the same isn't it (or perish)...