Timeline for Why do build tools use a scripting language different than underlying programming language?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 22, 2015 at 13:00 | comment | added | Luaan | @slebetman It's only fair - Unix won the previous "war" by being cheaper (compared to the LISPM's and similar machines). It was absolutely horrid, awfully designed and crashing constantly (but it boots up so much faster than a LISPM! :P), using C as primary programming language (quite a high fall from LISP and similar), but it was much cheaper. In fact, many adopted it because it was free (there's been many free mutations long before Linux). In fact, I've met lots of old-school LISPers who preferred MS-DOS to unixes of the time. Yes, that horrible. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 9:42 | comment | added | Ian | @gbjbaanb, agreed today, but go back even only 10 years and there were too many distros to choose from and each customer expected you to support the one they had chosen. Once you sold a system to a customer on a given distro, they expected surport for new versions of that distros over the next 5 or 10 years, even if new customers wanted a different distros. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 9:21 | comment | added | gbjbaanb | @Ian nobody compiled custom kernels for AIX. Even with Linux, you can compile your kernel if you want... but hardly anyone who uses Linux does. Don't listen to the powerhackers as representative of 99.999% of Linux users. Why do you think there are long-term-support versions of distros like Redhat and Ubuntu, and locked-down versions like Chromebooks. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:54 | comment | added | Ian | If I want a computer to run software I have written myself, then I want it be flexible and have 101 options how the kernels is compiled etc. However if I am selling software to be installed on the customer’s computer, I want the customer to be running a OS that is not flexible, so that I know it will work on their computer if it works on mine. That was a big factor when looking at Linux as a software vendor - support just looked too expensive. Linux has won the hosted server software wars, where the server is provided by the software vendor – e.g. most web deployed software. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:33 | comment | added | slebetman | People tend to forget that Unix used to mean "expensive". Windows won the desktop/workstation war by being cheaper. It's for the same reason that Linux later won the server war. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:03 | comment | added | Ian | This was DESKTOP software GIS, imaging processing, map editing, road traffic modeling, mobile phone coverage, etc. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 8:01 | comment | added | Ian | As to porting to windows. A customer could put a unix work station AND a windows 95 PC on each desk, or just a NT machine. At the time Intel based systems were about a 1/4 of the price of unix systems. The linux project was only just starting. | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 7:56 | comment | added | Ian | Let’s add, there was 4 main products built of this code base along with a handful of custom solutions for large customers. Each product or custom solution had different versions of 10s of modules along with 10s of modules that was only used in it. The build system controlled what version of each module was used for each product. (I think there was about 300 modules in all, so even deciding on the version fo each module that when into a give version of a given product was hard.) | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 7:52 | history | edited | Ian | CC BY-SA 3.0 | edited body |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 6:01 | comment | added | Stack Exchange Broke The Law | @oaked I just mean it's typo'd as "Unit". (Hence the bold "x") | |
| Sep 22, 2015 at 5:56 | comment | added | oakad | @immibis This was the fashionable thing to do 15 years ago. Even more so, this practice was actually endorsed and encouraged by the leading Unix vendors (SGI and DEC in particular, but IBM too). | |
| Sep 21, 2015 at 22:22 | comment | added | dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten | Having worked on several bigish systems I sometimes feel like I have a handle on how development scales. Then I read stories like this. Sheesh. | |
| Sep 21, 2015 at 21:08 | history | answered | Ian | CC BY-SA 3.0 |