[ros-general] OK, Time for a few words..

[jwalsh at bigpond.net.au]

Hi Lyrical.
How can I possibly argue with that, assembler and "C" will always be necessary.
It goes without saying.
If we ever do get a ros-programming list, they will both be basic learning requirements.
And if we do get it, then a ros-user list, just for non programmers will likewise be a requirement.
As for ros-programming, we already have a link to MingGW-Msys which is dedicated to creating both Windows and Win-Linux Applications. It has about 5 years of experience.
ReactOS already comes better supplied with free software than Microsoft. But unfortunately it comes as a benefit to Microsoft too.
Already MinGW-Msys has a sizable library of tools, for the enthusiastic How-to programmer.
ReactOS can seriouly compete with Windows, but only if it maintains a high level of  Free Professionalism.
That is not necessarily a contradition. A professional attitude assists the Free Open Source development.
For us older and I hope wiser ex-professionals programmers, we lean more to the What-if-User side.
The basic programming requirement for us, I believe is the second great product of the Bell engineers, AWK:    Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan. 
That lead to Perl. It is almost impossible to get us away from programming, no matter how high we go.

But there are those who don't want to program at all, just play What-if games of illusion.
The ideal tool for that is a Spread Sheet, like excel. That and IBM RPG are my pet hate.
If you have a Maths and Process Control  bent, then is has to be Haskell and Lambda programming.
http://www.haskell.org/
But if that is too much like programming then we look for an Integrated Development Environment,  IDE like:.
Smalltalk, the great creation from Palo Alto Research Center PARC, and funded with heaps of Xerox money;
  http://www.cs.uta.fi/kurssit/OPOK/smalltalk/Smalltalk%20Express/
  It is less than 3MB compressed (must switch display to 256 color), and free NC
  It will actually run and access files on a hard disk in Safe Mode. Impossible?? then try it.

A similar great creation of Alain Colmerauer and Robert Kowalski is Prolog. That can also be downloaded from http://www.pdc.dk/  .  It is really the old Borland Turbo Prolog and FreeNC

An example of the Power of IBM VisualSmalltalk is Liberty Basic   www.libertybasic.com/  and FreeNC Just Basic   http://www.justbasic.com/  .
It is less then 3 MB compressed and is wowing the older and younger VBasic enthusiasts and runs under windows. It uses a Smalltalk VM to interpret Vbasic commands and executes them in Smalltalk.
It is am amazing demonstration of the power of the Software Illusion.

Anyway they are all here on: 
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Wikipedia+hello+world&btnG=Google+Search

But before all of that, we need to structure our ros-general to better support these diverse requirements.
Ros-general is becoming too crowded.
All these Languages are too much to handle and still have time to get on with the job.

Cheers and rosuccess
Justin




http://www.cs.uta.fi/kurssit/OPOK/smalltalk/Smalltalk%20Express/


---- Lyrical Nanoha <LyricalNanoha at dosius.net> wrote: 
> On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, jwalsh at bigpond.net.au wrote:
> 
> > If I may add my 2 cents worth.
> > I too have a spot in my heart for Linux Gui's, both KDE and Gnome.
> > However the overheads are too high. So I have 3 three Thinkspads on the net.
> > and a comfortable swivel chair.
> 
> Try QVWM, FVWM or XFCE 3.8 and you'll see that a window manager doesn't 
> have to be bloated.  All of those run nicely in 64 MB RAM and I have run 
> QVWM and FVWM successfully on 32.  KDE otoh strains and groans in 64 MB.
> 
> > Suffice to say I have now dumped Linux and gone back to Unix BSD and bash.
> 
> Well, BSD isn't legitimately called "UNIX" anymore, but still.  BSD tools 
> are lighter than GNU tools, and more efficient.  GNU itself is very 
> bloated.
> 
> -uso.
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