Re: Y Store now C++

[John Morrison <address@hidden>]

On Tuesday 25 February 2003 10:04 am, Sundar Narasimhan wrote:
> Most of them suggested that they'd either been told to learn it by

[ what *they* said -- snip snip ]

One of our sales guys once shocked me by saying that while it may be
true that salespeople lie, they do not lie nearly as much as customers
do.  His point was that customers do not *deliberately* lie, but they
often do not understand what is really causing their pain, in much the
same way a patient "lies" to his doctor.

> So the mental model I had at the time was
> 1. people getting tired of VB being inapplicable for complex projects
> wanting to move up
> 2. people getting tired of C/C++ *issues* and wanting to simplify their
> lives and move on
> 3. people learning a "new" language and camps 1. and 2. telling them
> to do Java
> 4. opinion makers who'd decided that the costs / $$ were going to be
> in Java for a variety of reasons and hence were telling their staff to
> go learn them
>
> 4. has always been an important category for me (because they
> controlled and control economic value chains, and actually make money
> -- even today, as opposed to in the dot-com hype-ridden days). I can't
> offer many words of wisdom about such people -- only that over time,
> I've grown to be in the programmer demographic that views them as
> smart and capable.. not at all stupid.

Is this the only possible diagnosis, or is another possible
interpretation that all of these are due to the buzz created around
Java by aggressive marketing and resulting network effects, a.k.a.,
the Law of Increasing Returns?

-jm

p.s., I feel like there should be a corollary to the network effects
law, reserved for when the masses embark upon a truly self-destructive
course, like switching to Perl or MS Windows.  Perhaps it should be
called something alliterative like:

 The Lemming Lemma to the Law of Increasing Returns

I have these disturbing visions of CGI programmers hurling themselves
into chaotic seas of seldom-otherwise-used ASCII characters.

-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
==== http://www.mak.com/
==== vox:617-876-8085 x115
==== fax:617-876-9208
==== jm@mak.com