[jirka 5z com: Re: Broken i18n and the new UI handler.]

[George <jirka 5z com>]

I forgot to send this to the appropriate addresses to which it was really
meant to.  So here I correct this mistake by crossposting my crap everywhere
to waste all of your time and bandwidth, enjoy.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   If you think nobody cares if you're alive,
   try missing a couple of car payments.
                       -- Earl Wilson

--- Begin Message ---

• From: George <jirka 5z com>
• To: gnome-hackers nuclecu unam mx
• Subject: Re: Broken i18n and the new UI handler.
• Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 22:11:44 -0700

On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 12:17:01PM +0200, egger suse de wrote:
>  I tend to disaggree here. Using CORBA everywhere bloats the source and
>  adds complexity. Sure it's nice to have components here and there but
>  forcing a programmer to use this functionality without providing any
>  benefits is overkill and face it or not but in some cases CORBA doesn't
>  provide any. No, I don't want scriptability in simple games for
>  example.

This is incredibly shortsighted.

Yes right NOW it may seem like not such a good idea to have something like
gcalc support scripting etc...  But the idea is CONSISTENCY.  If we will
reimplement ideas on different levels just to avoid some sort of evil library
dependency, we'll spend all of our time maintaining much more code.

The complexity of applications is getting larger.  GNOME as a project is
getting much larger.  At the same time, the coderbase is not getting any
larger.  We need to find GENERAL solutions, not specific solutions.

Think back to the time when unix was rewritten in C.  At that time I bet a
lot of people would say that it will only cause bloat, since you can write a
much smaller kernel if you hand optimize some assembly.

Even if we say "this software won't last more then a few years", we should
look at history.  Software lasts FAR longer then the developers meant for it
to last.  While NOW is a somewhat valid argument, by the time it is even
integrated well everywhere, it will be 2 years from now and the world will
again be different.  Not to mention that this stuff is not supposed to
dissappear in 2 years.

We want to beat microsoft.  Let's not write something that's better NOW,
because by the time we are done, it'll be obscolete.  Let's write something
that will make sense in 2 or 5 years.  Because that's when we'll beat them.
Because we aren't beating them now.  We also need to reduce developer time.
We want to get as high level as we can.  High level interfaces are easy to
change underneath, can last much longer of a time, and make developers more
productive.  The fact that today it will take a meg or two more is absolutely
irrelevant.

I have no qualms with putting CORBA into every app.  That will make the
developers life easier, and any extra memory it will require will make no
difference in a couple of years.  (Not to mention that I would contend that
if everything used general corba interfaces we could REDUCE memory usage by
reusing a lot more code, but that's a different argument).

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
                       -- Pablo Picasso

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