[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[gérard Calliet]

Le 17/12/2018 à 16:47, Dave Froble a écrit :
> On 12/17/2018 6:46 AM, johnson.eric at gmail.com wrote:
>> On Friday, December 14, 2018 at 10:16:57 AM UTC-5, gérard Calliet wrote:
>>
>>> Done. I'm beginning to understand the "goal" here, at c.o.v.: some
>>> bitter discussions between "old men".
>>>
>>> And, no, no, you are proving you are older than all, here. The war
>>> between the old and the modern is the oldest war, the most sterile, and
>>> the most absurd.
>>
>> 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".
Yes, right. But because you are excessive, I have to be more schematic. 
And, as noted, you take a part of my opinion and conclude. Descriving 
innovation like you do is - my opinion - absurd. Real innovation is not 
about "old" and "new", it is about being able to invent subtle 
differences on existent theories or action. I don't think Einstein would 
speak of Newton as an "old" scientist. And renewal of fundamental in 
physics is about subtle unseen differences.
For sure there is all day new things, and it is good. But speaking about 
VMS only like an "old" thing is absurd.
>>
>> 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. 
You didn't mention xslt programming and scala, the 2 I do like and 
used... on VMS.
We are living in an era of a language explosion which is
>> good.
>>
I agree. But we are also in an era where there are less and less OS's 
and it is not a good thing. It is the same reasons of diversity 
necessity which explain there are be multiple structure of OS, and which 
explain it is good there exist multiple languages. But because of some 
business reasons multiple OS are more difficult to keep alive. It is 
very important that VSI could successfully maintain an original and 
valuable OS.
>> 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.A lot of *tools* and a lot missing on VMS, I know it. What is important 
here is about fundamental *structures* of thinking and organizing an OS 
and the way it is developped, and the consequences on the surprising 
resiliency observed for the VMS ecosystem.

The history of DEC (pdp, vax, alpha, vms,...) has been an innovation 
story, not because of a lot of "new" things, but because of the strength 
of the structural differences invented. Same thing for languages: lot of 
langages but the important differences are in paradigm evolution (from 
assembler to procedural, emergence of functional paradigm, contract 
programming...). I hope VSI not only will keep alive VMS, but they are 
in the innovation tradition which can product real innovations.

And no, I don't hear the "was good then, still good now". About all the 
discussions here are about what we have and what we miss, which is, in 
my opinion, not the good way of analyzing why VMS survived, and how or 
which will be its future, but you cannot say that, every one here is a 
minima willing to say exact things.
>>
>> EJ
>>
> 
> You're most likely correct, to some extent.  But, I really cannot 
> resist.  How many sides do you have on your "new" wheels?
> 
Very good point :)