Re: [Fwd: Re: Wikipedia criticism about root]

Hi Christian,

On Sat, 2006-07-01 at 00:17 +0200, cstrato wrote:
> Hi Christian
>
> > I guess Andy's arguing that you could have a better GUI by reusing some
> > specialised libraries like GTK, Qt, Wx, or what not. However, one will
> > do good to remember the state of the Unix desktop back in 1995.
>
> My gui application has meanwhile a very complex user interface, it
> has more than 40,000 LOC using only the ROOT gui classes, and it
> is very stable. I was really surprised myself, how stable the gui is!

I think you got my point, namely, that in 1995 there was no such thing as Qt, GTK, Wx, and probably not Swing either - ah well, those were the days of FVWM or MWM and Motif :-)

> > As the machines are getting faster, Java looks more and more attractive
> > - since the additional overhead of the virtual machine is
> > disappearing.
>
> As someone having started programing an IBM 1130 mainframe with
> 16 kb core memory, I still cannot accept to waste processor power
> using a language which is based on 30 year old technology (p-code
> of UCSD-Pascal!)

Most computer science concepts are 30+ years old :-)

> The argument to develop code only once and run it on all machines
> is for me no argument.

To me, it's appealing - think GRID :-) ROOT's solution is to use ACLic to do a `pseudo' `code-once, run-everywhere'. Not necessarily a bad solution.  

> BTW, it may well be that a program based on
> ROOT may run on more supported architectures than a Java program.

iPAQ - hi Fons :-) Or a small ARM processor on a FEE card perhaps?

> NeXT and MacOS X developers always say that Obj-C is much easier
> to use than C++, and Obj-C has all the advantages of Java w/o the
> disadvantages (As far as I know, Java has taken the features of
> Obj-C and the syntax from C++) Sorrowly, Obj-C is not mainstream.

I'm not that familiar with ObjC, but it looks sort of OK. Then again, some people - like the US DOD - swears on Ada.

> > "ROOT's Object Oriented Technologies" - it's right there at the top of
> > the web-page :-)
>
> I must have missed this, and I am still not able to see it. The top
> of my ROOT main page says "ROOT An Object Oriented Data Analysis
> Framework" and the title is "The ROOT System Home Page - Mozilla"
> - but maybe I am too stupid to see it :-)

Uh, they must have changed it. It used to say that, isn't that right Fons and Rene? Perhaps it's back to basics: `ROOT's the rOOt of everyThing' :-) I'm sure some people will hate that one :-)

Yours,

-- 
 ___  |  Christian Holm Christensen 
  |_| |  -------------------------------------------------------------
    | |  Address: Sankt Hansgade 23, 1. th.  Phone:  (+45) 35 35 96 91
     _|           DK-2200 Copenhagen N       Cell:   (+45) 24 61 85 91
    _|            Denmark                    Office: (+45) 353  25 404
 ____|   Email:   cholm_at_nbi.dk               Web:    www.nbi.dk/~cholm
 | |