[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2018-12-17, johnson.eric at gmail.com <johnson.eric at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For me the main issue that I see here is a persistent desire to not learn
> something new because "we've always done it that way".
>

I agree. It's tempting to stay with what you know, but I for one try
to expose myself to a range of new ideas and technologies. Sometimes
I find it's just marketing hype and the old ways are better and
sometimes I find the new ways bring positive benefits.

The important thing is that you have to be willing to try out new ideas
even if you then reject them because your experience tells you the old
ways were better.

> For example, have you learned a new programming language? There are
> so many to pick from. Consider rust, ruby, perl, python, go, swift,
> haskell, OCaml, Objective C, or a fresh look at C++-17. I'm sure there are
> others too. We are living in an era of a language explosion which is good.
>
> How about a new IDE? Eclipse? Atom? Even Visual Studio deserves a
> fresh look now too. I'm an old emacs guy myself, but have gone through
> a refresh with the latest packages like projectile, helm, and org-mode. 
>
> How about a new source code management tool? Have you tried git,
> mercury, perforce (which is available on VMS!), bitkeeper? How 
> about things like phabricator or other code review tools? Jenkins and
> continuous integration? Google mock or google test for unit tests?
>
> How about a new file system? btrfs? ext4? zfs? xfs? Or various
> package managers? yum? Or linux distros?
>
> Have you tried things like github, gitlab, or a cloud service like
> digital ocean, microsoft's azure, or bigquery from google?
>
> How about things like mongodb, redshift, or other nosql like
> solutions?
>
> Maybe you have, but based on so much of the commentary I see here,
> it looks like everything could be summed up as - was good then, still
> good now.
>

One more thing in addition to that above extensive list of yours.

It's well known what I think of certain parts of VMS security, but
what do _you_ think with your clear exposure to a wide range of other
technologies ?

For you, what parts of VMS security would stand out to an outsider as
"well, that _really_ needs fixing" and what parts come across as
"well, that's not too bad."

Are there any parts of VMS security which appear to you to still be
leading the other operating systems ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world