[Info-vax] inertia or fundamentals about langages?

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 22 May 2019 20:53:43 UTC+1, gérard Calliet  wrote:
> Le 22/05/2019 à 20:15, Stephen Hoffman a écrit :
> > As for OpenVMS ports, I've seen three of those from the inside.  Two 
> > more—RSX-11M to VAX/VMS, and this current x86-64 port—from the outside. 
> > Each had clever bits.  I found the Mach port to be the most clever.
> Sorry dear scholar, I go back to my mud, hoping I'll have enought 
> contracts to survive.
> 
> Some formal remarks, however: induction from extreme examples gives 
> biaises to reasonments ; and *lots* of examples is not a proof.
> 
> And you are right: I was not speaking about theoretical computer 
> science, only about general ways of thinking.
> Kant was quoted there, I don't know if they read it in US. I supposed it 
> could be the case, because in the times you ported rsx and vms Ruth 
> Goldenberg used to have rich epigraphs on her chapters. Other times, 
> where thinking seemed to be a normal occupation even for programmers. 
> Nowadays we are cleverer, we count the contracts and there are our 
> epigraphs. In a sense I feel too old.

Careful.

A business doesn't need enough *contracts* (customers) to 
survive, it needs enough *money*. 

Intel never had enough IA64 customers for IA64 to have 
much of a future, but Intel had enough *money* to convince 
some proportion of the faithful that IA64 was going to be 
"Industry Standard 64bit" (despite the engineering evidence
that said otherwise, and the financial evidence that said 
IA64 would always be a moneypit).

Clearly the arrival of AMD64 was a bit "disruptive" for
Intel's IA64 ambitions. But Intel carried on with IA64 for 
a while, the company still had plenty of money. Plenty of
similar examples at Intel and elsewhere.

For companies that don't have an Intel-scale cash mountain 
(not many do), a small number of high value (profitable) 
customers in a relatively niche market may sometimes be more 
valuable to aparticular supplier/user community than a huge 
number of low value customers. 

If that weren't the case, companies like National Instruments/NI
(the LabView etc people) would have collapsed long ago. Companies 
such as NI are also helped by the fact that their community is 
probably more engineering-oriented than the commodity 
fashion victims in so many other sectors now considered to be "IT".

But obviously the commodity suppliers and their "one size fits all"
"the cloud is the answer, now what's the question" "never mind the
quality look at the brand" people won't see it that way, either 
because they don't understand the picture or they don't *want* to 
understand the picture.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/nati?ltr=1

Interesting times.