Comment Won't reach critical mass (Score 3) 252
Present html clients have existed for several years now, but people still haven't upgraded to the latest and greatest (for whatever reason).
You have to reach a certain critical mass before you can dominate a market. This is doubly true for communication applications, because how can you communicate with a fellow on the other end unless you both speak the same language? Since we gave up on the glorious and noble enterprise of Esperanto, we've conceded the human-language field, but we're still working on the computer-language ones.
How can they expect enough people to adopt this new language? If you're writing for Flash or Shockwave, then you're already leaving out a lot of your userbase. Even if you write standard html, you're leaving out lots of user userbase, because of browsers' bugs (though IE, I have to say, doesn't have a single bug with rendering standard html). You're in the business of delivering your product, information, and you have to do it in a form your clients can understand.
That's why we should give up on html and java/javascript and return to a language that everyone already has on his computer: Basic. Thanks to the diligent efforts of Microsoft and other companies, who have brought Basic into the 21st century, Basic already enjoys a bigger userbase than any other language (except perhaps Fortran's). Because so many programmers grew up writing their first programs in Basic, there exists a fluent userbase already. Basic is easily extensible and rather object-oriented when you consider its vast legacy.
We should stick with the languages we already know and know well. It's better to improve what we already have than to open ourselves up to new incompatibilities and build ourselves another penthouse suite on the Tower of Babel.
You have to reach a certain critical mass before you can dominate a market. This is doubly true for communication applications, because how can you communicate with a fellow on the other end unless you both speak the same language? Since we gave up on the glorious and noble enterprise of Esperanto, we've conceded the human-language field, but we're still working on the computer-language ones.
How can they expect enough people to adopt this new language? If you're writing for Flash or Shockwave, then you're already leaving out a lot of your userbase. Even if you write standard html, you're leaving out lots of user userbase, because of browsers' bugs (though IE, I have to say, doesn't have a single bug with rendering standard html). You're in the business of delivering your product, information, and you have to do it in a form your clients can understand.
That's why we should give up on html and java/javascript and return to a language that everyone already has on his computer: Basic. Thanks to the diligent efforts of Microsoft and other companies, who have brought Basic into the 21st century, Basic already enjoys a bigger userbase than any other language (except perhaps Fortran's). Because so many programmers grew up writing their first programs in Basic, there exists a fluent userbase already. Basic is easily extensible and rather object-oriented when you consider its vast legacy.
We should stick with the languages we already know and know well. It's better to improve what we already have than to open ourselves up to new incompatibilities and build ourselves another penthouse suite on the Tower of Babel.
