Bob Weiner wrote:
>
> I like the concepts in Groove a lot but I also saw serious issues
> in my brief evaluation:
>
> * Not only is the platform not an open one (e.g. their security is not
> open to inspection) but there present intent is to be the sole service
> provider for the platform which may limit the market traction somewhat.
>
This is the real, major killer. The system needs to be a platform that
others build on to compete. In other words, it should be Windows, and
not an Office Suite.
> * The outlining and other interactive tools were quite primitive, slow
> and not well thought out, even when running as a single user.
>
Agreed. In a word, they suck. I would only consider it as a stop gap,
useful for designing its replacement, and only then in the absence of
anything better.
> * They went with C++ on implementation and used hard to read symbol naming
> conventions (no underscores) making extensions much more work than they
> need to be. A better solution would have been a much better, efficient
> OO language coupled together with a higher-level but still fully general
> scripting language.
>
I'm partial to Java, for the moment -- until it's replacement comes
along. CodeGuide is the first really significant GUI I've seen written
in Java. And its performance is actually quite good! So life is looking
good.
At this point, though, I'm ready to move away from any kind of primitive
data types. Interally, primitives should be used whenever possible. But
when I'm coding, I want to see the maximum regularity and consistency.
Another annoyances:
* checking for string == null OR string == ""
* checking for array=null or arraySize == 0
* arrays, themselves
(like primitives, they should be exorcized, and replaced with
Josh Bloch's elegant collections classes)
But these are minor warts on the language. ("Syntactic Sugar" is
my middle name.)
However, a high level scripting language is still a major
requirement for the delivered system.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:58:02 PDT