On 27/12/16 03:21, L A Walsh wrote:
It's not a new idea. SGI did it 15-20 years ago, and dynamic GUI configuration was done based on available features on **Plato** back in the 70's!
Do we ever learn? A large number of today's programmers didn't come out of a Computer Science curriculum and were self taught. While they know the most important and most needed stuff to stay employed, they usually don't care about "history" and thus are doomed to repeat mistakes and problems solved 40-50 years ago. :-(
A lot of yester-year's programmers didn't come out of a Comp-Sci course either - my first boss was a Maths graduate (I don't think they had Comp-Sci back then :-). I'm a Science graduate. My first computer was the company mini with 256K ram for an entire office of 20 or more people :-)
Thus SW doesn't really progress (and I've seen signs of it going *backward*).
Driven by "oohhh shiny ...." - not helped by Comp Sci !!! I'm well known as being very anti-relational (well, actually, anti first-normal-form) because I simply apply elementary maths to the 12 rules and discover that they are neither complete, nor consistent, and in fact are highly self-contradictory. No wonder modern databases are a nightmare to maintain. (My favourite challenge. Please STORE a list in an FNF database. Not model it, store it. Oh - and while you're at it, DON'T muddle data and meta-data in the same table. Have fun, it's impossible ... :-)
While CS used to design computer programs to be "user-friendly", now, because most programmers can't be bothered to learn how to do that, the demand is that *users*, be computer-adapted. Plegh.
The problem there is that the definition of "computer adapted" keeps on changing, and people can't adapt that fast :-( here endeth the follow-on rant :-) Cheers, Wol -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org