langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2004-05-18

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Dienstag, 18. Mai 2004

Forty-Four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken

2004-05-18-mistaChomsky

Frontier goes open: "But experience in the market said that, to succeed, UserLand didn't need to own its kernel. In fact, that it was the only developer using this kernel may well have been a liability for UserLand." — Surprise, surprise.

2004-05-18-openFrontiers

gavin 7492 days AGO
If it was 1998 this would be interesting. Now, it's just kind of sad.

man-uel 7492 days AGO
why? in many aspects, frontier is still miles ahead.

gavin 7492 days AGO
In 1998 you didn't have the many options for "scripting" things on the Mac. Now with Mac OS X, the options are plentiful. Sure, the mixing and matching of code and data is interesting but hardly compelling. According to the man himself, the Frontier codebase isn't all that super either, it hasn't been updated in years and has all of a few people that can make sense of it. As with many things Userland's been a part of-- always too little too late (or too loud or too wrong or too annoying.)

man-uel 7492 days AGO
c'mon, you can't compare frontier with a scripting language. that would be like comparing emacs with a text editor. yes you can do text editing in emacs, but its the environment aspect that matters. likewise, you can script in frontier, but actually frontier is a tool to think in, and to work in, totally, and it is an interesting tool, and has inspired many people, and has many fans. if that isn't success i don't know what is.

i have worked in frontier for years, and have used many tools since then, but frontier is still in the back of my mind at all times. the outliner, the scripting system, the database, all that you can't get anywhere else. if you haven't been a full-time frontier user you just can't judge it, but if you have been, you know that it was cutting-edge when it came out, and still is in many aspects.

i look forward to it being open source, and i know for sure that there will be a community of users which will happily hack away on it.

as to being late---he invented weblogging, right? :)

gavin 7492 days AGO
I was a Frontier user for many years as well and I agree, back then, it was really the only way to automate certain things (e.g. Quark for publishing.) But I disgree about it still being cutting edge.

I wonder if Frontier will have the same impact on the open source world that MacBird did? Frontier remains a real niche product.

motz 7492 days AGO
¿weblogging? sorry that point goes to tim berners-lee, sir tim berners-lee :)

chris 7491 days AGO
I wonder whether my reaction to the open sourcing of REBOL in 2008 will be the same as Gavin's today ...

chris 7491 days AGO
En plus, I have to say I really like the motivation:

"And the expectations are low. All I want it to see the technology preserved. If one young programmer in Podunk learns something from it, the way I learned from reading the Unix kernel in the late 70s, then I'm happy."

kris 7491 days AGO
NO! I invented weblogging. Winer wrote a news site but not a weblog.

I remember back in 2000 before the queso.com guy implemented permalinks in Manila. Winer always linked to the frontpage of a weblog while we already figured out how to link to the appropriate days in the Manila calendar. Those were the days.

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