Closed-source considered harmful (was: JavaScript considered harmful)

[Karl M. Syring]

"Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> schrieb
> "Karl M. Syring" <syring at email.com> wrote in message
> news:a1ibhn$qt4bg$1 at ID-7529.news.dfncis.de...
>     ...
> > Once upon a time, there was a company that controlled the hardware and
the
> > software market. Although some people say that it induced a statsi of 20
> > years, it was finally toppled.
>
> Interesting -- WHICH "twenty years" were the "stasis"?  Perhaps those
> which saw the birth and wildfire-like spread of Unix, C, relational
> database management systems, Pascal, interactive terminals, ... ?-)

I will not engage in alternative history lines, but I think bad languages
and bad computer architectures have prevailed for a very long time, even as
people knew better (*). Of course, the bad language problem has got even
worse.

Karl M. Syring

(*): A nice article by John McCarthy from the beginning of the 70's:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/hoter2/hoter2.html