On a related note, I would be interested to hear what parts of your company's product you have opened.
Funny you asked. I happened to work for a startup that got acquired by a big&evil corporation that specifically prohibited our engineers not only from opening our code, but even from contributing to existing OSS projects, which, partially sparkled my original post.
BTW, there is only one item on your list that qualifies as a valid answer to my question (for obvious reasons) and that is webmin.com, which is by far my favorite YC startup.
Yeah. Every time when someone tries to make a case for memchached they bring in Facebook and LiveJournal.
Well guess what: you aren't Facebook. You don't serve 21,000 requests per second. And you never will. Go and look at the size of your MySQL tables, then look at how much RAM your server has and what percentage of it is allocated to filesystem cache and how many real I/O reads/writes your hardware RAID does per second. Then come back and tell me again why do "we need to switch to memcached"?
"People often write in higher level languages because they want lots of bad code fast."
Even if this is true, it's true only in enterprise software environment where code quality has never been terribly important. Therefore it can't really be an argument against higher level languages in the context of a typical HN discussion.
You said "not really" and then agreed with me. Moreover, you only confirmed my theory that when people say "open source" it usually means commercial companies milking OSS developers, or releasing their code "contributions" for products that have no commercial value to them (Obj-C, Chrome).
Where is the code for Aperture? Final Cut Pro? Numbers/Pages? Even iTunes? I also want to see the code for Google's page rank, BigTable and gmail.
I also want to see scribd code for converting MS Office documents to iPaper. 90% of their solution consists of Open Office code that they took freely and haven't released theirs in return.
So? Despite being useful, what's so interesting about CRUD programming for the enterprise? I've been there, I've had my share of dealing with coworkers that openly admit that they haven't touched a single book since graduation 10 years ago and they see no reason why would they want to.
That's the kind of programmers this industry attracts, and that's the kind of software it builds. What's so interesting about it? Why even bother mentioning these numerous java/C# jobs? My ex-wife with zero programming experience has trained herself in less than a month to run a simple SQL queries in Visual basic and blast results in a grid control on a form, so did thousands of ex-taxi drivers in late 90s. So?
That's because our system somehow rewards real estate speculators, mortgage brokers, middle management, lawyers and healthcare professionals way more than it rewards engineers. I don't really know why this is happening, but I am sure you all have met a few MBA types who have "the vision" and looking for "just" a code monkey to build their fortune. This is also the reason why GE/Ford/Chrysler continued building shit for decades, giving out multi-million dollar bonuses to their top-tier management.
Someone suggested it's because we live in a "services economy" not a "product economy" and, therefore, the value of engineering is declining. There is some truth in that: google isn't an engineering firm, they are in the entertainment business, very much like ESPN, Fox and those annoying guys in big hats at your local Tres Amigos.
I am not sure why are you bringing enterprise software into the discussion. Despite being the most popular form of employment for "programmers" it has always been the absolutely lowest form of life in a software ecosystem and, therefore, should be ignored and left out of any intelligent discussion about programming.
In the 90s it was Visual Basic, now it's Java and C#, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what most of us consider to be discussion worthy.
I guess it heavily depends on a market segment, but for "family computer software" it is true: lots of PC users playing with free/evaluation versions but for when it comes to premium subscriptions and premium features - most of them evaporate, whereas Mac users like to stick around.
Look at various PC/Mac softwares out there: most of PC-only software belongs to "free&shitty" category, but nearly everything for OSX you have to pay for, and they (users) are accustomed to it.
I am not sure if I can post results of the research my company has done (and paid for) here.
Hm... I get exact same stripes about twice a month, usually when it gets really hot, most commonly when watching a movie via Hulu or iTunes. But it always goes away if I turn it off/on. I never bothered going to an Apple store because I couldn't reproduce this reliably. Perhaps I should. Has anyone here tried to fix a similarly unreliable problem?
You're lucky: I also do desktop software but we can't afford to ignore the growing number of Mac users. While they still represent only about 8% of all computer purchases, they account for nearly half of "customers who pay for software" and C# isn't an option for us although we keep monitoring Mono's progress.
Also, allow me to disagree with you on something:
"If you have a small, well-scoped application, like your RSS daemon, C++ is going to be best of breed in most cases. Similarly, if performance is your absolute primary concern, there's nothing out there that can compete.
For most desktop software, though, neither of these things are true."
Perhaps it's our difference in backgrounds, but most desktop software is more like that: small pieces that need small downloads, small memory footprints and instantaneous startup times. Just count the number of executable files on your hard drive and see what percentage of them eats more than 3MB of RAM (measured in 'private bytes'). Or you can look at the list of running processes: you'll see perhaps 1-3 behemoths like Firefox or Photoshop there, and one can only wonder how FireFox memory consumption would look like under JVM or .NET VM.
Makes perfect sense: they've clearly separated traditions and habits from religion.
The tradition of getting married in church is no different from a habit of screaming "jesus motherfucking christ!" when faced with a scary chance of seeing Texas Tech playing in a national championship game: no reason to call someone religious on both grounds.
prospero, I have been looking for C++ replacement for desktop programs non-stop for at least 5 years and found nothing. Rubies, lisps and pythons are great in a little dark corner of server-side development where everything is under your control, but for targeting thousands of varying desktops you just can't take that route since many additional variables come into play: size of downloads, performance, startup times, windows compatibility, etc etc etc. Plus, all VM-based languages suffer from so-so integration into native OS or/and excessive weight. You can write an IDE or an Excel replacement in them, sure, but most desktop software tends to be much smaller.
My last C++ project was a background daemon that would download your RSS feeds and do some fancy parsing. I wish I could show you how much memory Java prototype has eaten vs C++ version processing the same OPML file.
No, C++ is not "essentially worthless" without Boost. In fact I never use all of Boost: your build times becomes #1 conversation topic in the office when you do. It's better to cherry-pick a few important and lightweight pieces (like pointers, any, functional, etc). Don't forget about HUGE selection of plain C libraries too.
Whatever C++ has been used for is still being written and re-written in C++ as we speak. Newer languages and paradigms wiped out the giant Visual Basic army of developers (yes, this is what people used to code "basecamps of the 90s" in, but I don't see these languages threaten C++/C/Obj-C domination for desktop software on Win/Linux/OSX.
In fact, how many native Python or Ruby GUI libraries are out there? I haven't heard of one. Only bindings to GTK/Qt.
With all that said, I will be the first to jump the wagon. If I ever get so lucky.
63 points for these "news"? A public rant about a competitor is "news" here? And how ethical is it to blog about such things? I've never seen a CEO of a company publicly bitching about how badly competitors treat him. Jesus I know for sure to never approach Zoho with a business proposal in fear of turning any potential dispute into a dirty laundry hanging in public.
And why is it even supposed to be interesting for anyone outside of Zoho/Salesforce? I wish we could see IP addresses of people who voted this stuff up: I wonder what percentage of originated from India.
Sridhar, here is an idea for you: write a post titled "Zoho shall pay no taxes" and make your workers vote it up on every public news site.
63 points for these "news"? A public rant about a competitor is "news" here? And how ethical is it to blog about such things? I've never seen a CEO of a company publicly bitching about how badly competitors treat him. Jesus I know for sure to never approach Zoho with a business proposal in fear of turning any potential dispute into a dirty laundry hanging in public.
And why is it even supposed to be interesting for anyone outside of Zoho/Salesforce? I wish we could see IP addresses of people who voted this stuff up: I wonder what percentage of originated from India.
Sridhar, here is an idea for you: write a post titled "Zoho shall pay no taxes" and make your workers vote it up on every public news site.
Agreed. He's suggesting that most people haven't realized the possibilities of it yet.
I am observing the opposite: the mainstream public (looking at my non-techie friends) have been fully exposured to it, had enough of it, and is slowly getting tired of it. We're not talking about early adopters anymore: everybody has an online identity and has learned its limitations and implications.
If anything, social networks are getting boring: outside of your real circle of friends you see the same strangers posing to be smarter, better looking and happier than they really are: people aren't that different after all, and your real social network stays where it has always been: in your cell phone's address book.
And that's where I'll be turning to for an advice about finding a doctor or a car mechanic. I don't give a rat's ass about what "people on the internet" have to say. At least half of them voted for Bush. Twice.
Funny you asked. I happened to work for a startup that got acquired by a big&evil corporation that specifically prohibited our engineers not only from opening our code, but even from contributing to existing OSS projects, which, partially sparkled my original post.
BTW, there is only one item on your list that qualifies as a valid answer to my question (for obvious reasons) and that is webmin.com, which is by far my favorite YC startup.