Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Hertzfeld on CGI and RPC
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 7/11/2000; 2:48:27 PM Topic: scriptingNews outline for 7/10/2000 Msg #: 18466 (In response to 18465) Prev/Next: 18465 / 18467
Dave Winer: I don't know about Hertzfeld's vision. I've been developing distributed apps for 12 years now, and I can't think of a single time when I needed to move code over to another machine to run. If I had, I would have done it, it's trivial to do.Yeah, it's very much one of those things that's dependent upon what class of problem you're trying to solve. Huge classes of problems don't literally need bits of code running on multiple systems with extraordinarily low bandwidth and extraordinarily high latency among them. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of software on a single machine didn't need to run on a Connection Machine and wouldn't have clearly benefited from doing so. Massive parallelism, distributed or otherwise, isn't a panacea.
Dave: What I didn't like about his response was that it was more of the arrogance of General Magic. I never knew how much of it came from Andy and how much from others. They were the most arrogant company I had ever seen, to their detriment.
It's an easy trap for someone (person, organization, whatever) creating something new to fall into. It's not that no one ever accurately perceives a need before anyone else does; it's that it's hard to retain the humility to say "that might not be what I've done; I may end up pursuing my own fantasies instead."
Dave: On a personal level, when he's not part of some self-perceived behemoth, Andy is a very sweet guy. I hung out with him and Woz one afternoon a couple of years ago. And he reads my site, and I totally like that. Honestly, I was expecting a different response, something like "Hey it would be great to make our software work with yours."
And I wouldn't rule that out just yet, but yeah, the disappointment toward the initial response is totally understandable.
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