On Thu, 2007-11-01 at 18:05 +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 03:10:17AM +1100, skaller wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-11-01 at 09:01 -0400, Brian Hurt wrote:
> > > It's weird, and I don't understand it, but there are a lot of people for 
> > > whom Microsoft is a comfort zone- 
> > 
> > Huh? What's weird? Where have you been the last 3 decades?
> > Microsoft put computers on everyone's desktop, just as
> > Bill Gates said he would.
> > 
> > I guess 99% of all desktops run Windows. Quite a lot of
> > servers run Windows too.
> 
> Whew, really trying not to be bated on the Microsoft discussion here,
> but that is a _very_ odd view of history.

This is not history.. it's the current affairs of my life.
I watched it happen, I even helped a bit :)

> Open source developers use crap languages, I agree, but switching to
> C++ would hardly have improved the situation :-)

That's just silliness. C++ is a much better language than C for
application development.

I prefer Ocaml .. but hardly anyone here in Australia has even
heard of it (even companies using *nix).

> FWIW early versions of the Linux kernel could be and sometimes were
> compiled as C++ (though still of course written in C) so it's not like
> people were unaware of the language or lacked solid implementations at
> that point.

Lack of solid implementation was *always* the biggest problem. 
GNU wasn't even a player. It was only recently (last year?) 
that GNU finally released a  C++ compiler (4.X series) that 
could even parse C++ properly.

Don't forget the ISO C++ Standard wasn't ratified until this
millenium .. it's barely 7 years old. I think that is younger
than Linux kernel :)


-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net