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Fri, 14 Nov 2003
It's not abouot Mac vs Longhorn or Linux vs Longhorn
Yesterday's post on Longhorn got a fair number of reactions. Most of the folks who left comments were indignant Macintosh users. I agree that today Mac OS X is probably a superior operating system to Windows XP. That's one of the reasons that I asked for a Mac OS X machine as my official OSAF box. I wasn't talking about today. I was talking about tomorrow.

In my opinion, the future of application building, client or server side is on a platform where safe programming languages like Java, C#, Smalltalk, Lisp, or Python are the standard method of doing business. None of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux satisfies this criteria. So if you think I've become a Longhorn prosylte, think again. I'm merely stating something that I've stated over and over again in this blog. I want someone to give me a highly productive platform for application development. If you look at the stated plans of the three platforms, Longhorn is the one going in this direction. Apple is talking about Objective C and C++, where you can still chew your arm off by allocating wrong. Gnome and KDE are doing the C/C++ dance, except for Miguel, who thinks what I think -- that's why he's doing Mono.

The problem with almost all of the commenters is that they are looking at what is instead of what could be. Think of the vapor Longhorn as an example. Really, the only reason to say Longhorn is because so few people would know what I was talking about if I said Lisp Machine, or Xerox Dorado. Now Longhorn's no Dorado or Lispm, but its moving in that general direction, which is more than you can say for anybody else.

[23:21] | [computers/programming] | # | TB | F | G | 4 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post



Now Longhorn's no Dorado or Lispm, but its moving in that general direction, which is more than you can say for anybody else.

I am
not convinced Longhorn is significantly further toward this ideal than the other OSes. What Microsoft does have is a very large developer base all being shepherded in one direction.

That's not necessarily a bad thing for those developers, nor for those who would offer an alternative. I think the playing field is still wide open, and depends on the funding finding the better ideas out there for alternatives, or just value added, to Longhorn.
Posted by Patrick Logan at Sat Nov 15 12:28:09 2003

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I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
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