"Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent)" wrote:
> Short of government intervention can anyone think of a way to alter this
> scenario?  I fervently hope so. 

In a word, "Squeak", or something like it. 

Think of the Squeak VM as potentially a middleware layer allowing one to
write cross-platform applications -- using platform specific plugins to
allow the user to access system specific code when needed, and otherwise
work in an architecture neutral way. Actually Python is succeeding at
this somewhat, but has not had Squeak's elegance at the lowest layer of
simply putting bitmaps on the screen with a mouse keyboard event loop
(instead relying on large bodies of C code for the GUI like TK or
wxWindows).

With Squeak as a ubiquitous middleware layer, one's application becomes
to a large extent (not 100% but good enough) independent from the
underlying system -- by the VM+plugins isolating those dependencies. If
windows remains a strogn standard for device drivers and some other
services, the Squeak middleware layer lets you ride on top of that. If
Mac OS X or Linux interest in your app picks up, then the migration of
the core of your application is fairly feasible with minimal retesting
except for small parts of the system.

That's what I've long wanted Squeak (or the VM) to be -- as a layer
supporting multiple languages -- and what now .Net is claimed to be (but
won't really be). Java also failed to be that by not separating the VM
and the language (leading to a VM optimized for the wrong things), and
far worse -- Java missed the boat on having a common code implementation
vs. a common defined standard -- since quoting Alan Kay, "any written
standard with more than five lines is ambiguous" which is why Java is
write once, debug everywhere. 

Unfortunately, right now, today, when I think of a stable cross-platform
system (Mac, Windows, Linux), the only mostly polished solution is
VisualWorks, and then I'm still dependent on one company. Python (with
TCL/TK, wxWindows, or SDL), DrScheme, and Squeak which are all
(primarily) single codebase standards all come close to being cross
platform middleware, but all have serious rough edges or weak support on
a specific platform when one looks at them from a broad deployment
perspective (good as they are for other situations). There are a couple
of the choices if one is willing to work mostly in C or Basic or a few
other languages.

Just got a new computer and the first programming environment I ran on
it was Squeak because I could just copy across one folder with a few
files and double click. [The second was Python.] So Squeak is definitely
getting there if the loose edges can be resolved (which is just a lot of
work on issues [some of which are controversial] I won't rehash here).

-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software 
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com