From: Seebs Date: 2010-03-13T10:00:06+09:00 Subject: Re: Why no TextMate for Linux? On 2010-03-13, David Masover wrote: > On Wednesday 10 March 2010 10:55:11 pm Seebs wrote: >> But if the CURRENT version meets my needs, great! > So long as the current version continues to work. Well, yeah. You know, some of the computers I've bought in the past don't work anymore, either. Doesn't mean I was ripped off. >> It's not as if most people can realistically get a real feature change >> into vi. Even most programmers would be unlikely to find it worth the >> time and effort. > Most likely -- but having the ability is important. > I'm unlikely to ever want to, say, burn an American flag, but it is important > to me that I have that right. Non-comparable. No fundamental civil rights are infringed when I'm told I can't burn *someone else's* American flag. My right to write software is not infringed by my lack of a right to modify someone else's without permission. >> > * You're tied to an OS which is notorious for breaking backwards- >> > compatibility. >> lolwut? I have things from OS X 10.0, written for PowerPC systems, which >> still run on Intel in 10.6. > And I've seen things break from 10.3 to 10.4 to 10.5. So? I've got code which has been broken by just about every Linux system revision since RHEL4 or so. However, the bulk of my stuff keeps working, and the same is true of OS X; the bulk of the code out there continues to run. >> You have any evidence for this? I've been using OS X as one of my desktop >> platforms for about a decade now, and thus far, I've had VERY few programs >> broken by upgrades -- and those were always things which I would have >> expected to break, like low-level hacks into the window manager or >> something similar. > It's been long enough since I've used OS X that it's possible I'm remembering > low-level hacks. Then again, I remember even things like VLC would require at > least 10.3, and this is when 10.4 was the latest. So... That's backwards. Obviously, when developing, you tend to target a relatively recent system. That doesn't mean that a version of VLC which had been built for 10.2 wouldn't still work on 10.4. Your claim was that it was "as likely as not" that any given upgrade would break TextMate. But all you've shown so far is that at least one group of people who were actively updating software for new systems released something that ran on a previous system and the current system, but not on systems before that -- but that could be just because they linked against that system's libraries. >> > - Once you do upgrade, the new version of TextMate is as likely as not >> > to refuse to work on old versions of OS X, so you'd better upgrade all >> > your boxes at once. >> Again, this claim "as likely as not" seems pretty implausible to me. It's >> extremely unusual for anyone to make a tool like this not work on at least >> the two or three most recent revisions. > Two or three is nice, still means you're going to have to upgrade when it's > four, five, or six revisions out of date -- either the program or the OS. Yep. But five or six revisions is getting on towards a decade, and I buy a lot of programs that don't run for nearly that long. > With proprietary software, that's not an option -- Microsoft wanted to force > Vista on everyone, so they threatened to pull support for XP. That would've > meant security vulnerabilities, among other things, making life difficult for > those of us wanting to stay on XP -- no chance of any bugfixes. Microsoft > maintains support for old version of Windows, but to a point -- beyond which, > the community CANNOT take over. Right. Which might be a good argument against considering XP to be the basis of your business or livelihood, unless you have some particular reason for which it's really the best choice for you anyway. > Now consider the case of a killer app developed by a single individual. What > are the chances he's going to expend significant time and energy maintaining > old versions of TextMate when he could be working on a new version (and > charging for it) instead? Not particularly high -- but an editor isn't comparable to an OS (unless it's emacs). I don't have to worry about new malware targeting my editor, I do have to worry about new malware targeting my OS. > Can you see why I might be more inclined to trust a popular open-source > project developed by dozens (hundreds?) of people around the world, rather > than a proprietary project developed by a single person? Yes. But I can't see why you'd argue not just that this is a benefit, but that it's such a huge benefit that anyone who would prefer ANY other combination of features, values, or requirements over it is somehow objectively wrong. > Whew. That was hard to find the one tool which isn't portable, and I'm not > even sure about that -- it might run under Cygwin! Oh, sure, tons of stuff is portable. On the other hand, having suffered through Gaim^WPidgin for years, I *love* using Adium X. Yes, it means that my preferred chat program is OS X only. But that's a TINY price to pay for having a user interface that doesn't make me want to stab the developers with every kitchen implement I can find. My photo editor of choice is OS-specific. So are a few of the graphics tools I use, and my preferred word processor and paint program. On the other hand, they work a lot better for me than the alternatives, so I use them. >> I'm making myself an iPhone app. I dunno if I'll ever even get it to the >> point where I'd submit it to the app store. I want it for my own use. It >> is heavily tied to several proprietary frameworks. >> So what? Nothing else lets me do what I want. > Really? Android doesn't? That's interesting. One of the things I want is a pleasant development environment. The NextStep design was brilliant, and I still find it pleasant to work with. I've worked with a dozen or so UI toolkits, and this is the only one I haven't actively hated since Intuition. >> I don't have a problem with proprietary tools, IF they do their job well >> enough to justify the hassles. > I tend to agree, yet I notice, again, a trend where people like that > everything Ruby is open source, yet don't care to look for the same in their > OS or editor. Different kinds of tools have different requirements. Open source is *a* benefit. It is not *the* benefit. There are many cases where other things matter more. For editing, what I require most of all is that my editor be convenient, flexible, and stay out of my way. If Textmate does a better job for me than the open source alternatives, then of course I should use it. That I might not be able to later doesn't mean I shouldn't use the best tool I can find now. >> It is usually a bit of a tradeoff. I'll accept some non-portability of >> tools to get jobs done sooner and with less effort. > I'll do that, if it's enough sooner and enough less effort to justify the loss > of flexibility. I'd much rather spend a bit more time and get it right the > first time, using portable, flexible, open tools, so that I don't have to > completely redo it if something needs to be changed. I don't view choice of editor as really being a matter of "completely redo". It's one of many tools I use, and if I switch, well, I use a different editor. Whatever. An editor that works enough better for me than an alternative will save me an hour a day. Learning a new editor will take, say, a forty-hour week. If I use an editor for over forty days, I'm probably ahead on the deal -- if it really is that much nicer. >> I am a moderately experienced Unix geek, but the shared disk used by the >> various computers in my house is attached to a box running OS X Server, >> because the cost of my time to set all that stuff up correctly is an >> order of magnitude more than the cost to have something where I click the >> "yes, make this available to Windows too" button. > sudo apt-get install samba Yeah, I did actually set up samba. Three times. It was a nightmare to get it working reliably with several different windows systems, the documentation was crap, and it crashed fairly often. Building it is not the hard part; *configuring* it is. Wouldn't It Be Nice if someone shipped something that handled the basic cases ("I want to export this filesystem to authenticated users in this local workgroup") automatically? It may well have improved since I set it up; that was a few years back. I did not find it a particularly enlightening experience. > A fileserver is about the easiest thing to set up. I have to ask how much > you're being paid where half an hour or so of your time is more valuable than > the hardware markup for an OS X server. It's not "half an hour". It's "two hours the first time, one hour every time I have to redo things for some reason, and half an hour a week because of stuff going unexpectedly wrong". Whereas, with OS X, I clicked a button, and it worked fine, and has continued to work fine (except, of course, that the *client* machines were still unreliable). I don't enjoy system administration. The less time I have to spend on it, the happier I am. With the OS X machine, it took me half an hour to get reliable file sharing over three different (and unrelated) protocols, only one of which I could easily have configured myself, as well as having user authentication working for several different kinds of clients. Yes, I know how to set up authentication services. It's a pain, it takes time, and I don't enjoy it or find it rewarding. My interest level in learning enough about it to correctly set up a Windows workgroup in order to authenticate users in order to provide shared access to files which preserves user permissions between Mac, Windows, and BSD clients? Pretty much zero. My interest level in having it all work with a handful of clicks on clearly labeled UI items? Pretty high. I used to do a bunch of this stuff myself. I'd guess it cost me 20-30 hours a year. Compare to $500... That's around $25/hour, give or take. Now imagine that the server lasts for two years. It's now only a good deal if I make $12.50 an hour. Since $DAYJOB is salaried, I don't have a semantically-coherent hourly wage anymore, but this stuff all happens in my spare time, and none of the money-related things I do in my spare time are under $75/hour. A year's hassle dealing with the home network costs me a lot more than a mini with OS X server would. -s -- Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam@seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!