[Info-vax] inertia or fundamentals about langages?

[gérard Calliet]

I extract a part of the usual discussion about porting or not porting, 
with the usual suspects.

Because there I understand clearly why I don't agree.

 >> If a business is running on VMS and a major part of that business is 
 >> a web server front end and they have to move that front end to a 
 >> different platform where is the incentive to leave anything still on 
 >> the VMS system?

 >>>> The cost and the effort getting the apps ported off of OpenVMS, 
 >>>> usually.  Inertia.  This is the VSI market for the foreseeable 
 >>>> future.

A port is a translation. Thinking any translation has'nt any other cost 
than (time, effort,...) goes with the prejudice that all langages are 
totally equivalent, and so that total translation is always possible.

This prejudice is largely considered as wrong in linguistics, and, 
transferred in computer sciences - if you say "computers are another 
domain" - it could work theoritically only with pure formal langages 
(and again if we forget the fundamentals about termination problem).

A software is always some sort of langage used to cope with some 
specific issue. The more the software has history, the more the its 
"langage" is idiomatic, and the more the total translation is just a dream.

The dream of a total translation is however always present. It is one if 
the reason each decade brings a new "totally universal" solution, with 
which every tool, object, action, ressource could be unified. In a sense 
Cloud is our "unique" realm these years, as virtualisation has been 5 
years ago, SOA before...

One concrete consequence of this dream is that there are on any site a 
lot of concurrent "unique" realms.

And I agree that any company which gets now VMS is more concerned by the 
difficulty of integration of VMS in its 
not-so-unified-but-will-be-the-future site than by its intrinsik qualities.

Inertia is not at all the major reason not porting out of VMS. The major 
reason is that translating a well adapted langage to its situation to a 
x general langage is just an error, based on an oversight of some 
fundamentals.

My opinion is the opposite about inertia. The dream of an universal 
translation is a lack of effort thinking about the necessity of trading 
with different things different ways.

There are perhaps 2 symetric dreams: (1) thinking My langage Is The 
Langage [example: some VMS[unix,as400,pascal...] fanatics are like that 
:) ] (2) thinking Every Langage is translatable on Every Langage, the 
Universe should be Unified [Example: Every thing will be in the Cloud].

The VMS future is not at all because for some time inertia will protect 
it from other choices. It is because some things will remain on it 
because VMS is more adapted to their problem, and because the "langage" 
which was invented on it for x purpose is the better now for that purpose.

2 types of work are involved in the future:
(1) understanding the parts of the software that need VMS, and the parts 
which would be better worked elsewhere, which is to say understanding 
how the specifics of the use match the specifics of VMS and central 
parts developed on it,
(2) being able to "translate" the parts of the software that are 
translatable, which is creating the "interfaces".

All this said, it is perhaps why "some like it hot" and some not. On my 
side I like it (VMS) :)

Gérard Calliet