[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.vidd20ldeav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
> On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:34:00 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
>
>> PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar
>> with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we
>> have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and 
>> quality.
>
> Imagine if you had to pay for it ;)

There's a commerical web-app package for colleges called Blackboard. Hugely, 
enormously popular among college IT departments (ie, the target buyers). But 
it's undeniably total crap. Damn thing barely even works at all, and that's 
not just my observation, but the observation of many students at the 
colleges that use it.

Other commercial things that have been heavily used or popular and I would 
argue to have been of relatively poor quality (relative to either their 
price or to competing offerings) even at the time they were either heavily 
used or well-regarded (though I admit some might be debatable): Oracle DBMS, 
Lotus Notes, MS Visual SourceSafe, iPod, Cadillac/Oldsmobile, Visual Basic 
6, Classic ASP, Flash IDE, Photoshop, XBox 360.

> But one thing that for-sale art  does is weed out the unpopular artists.

I don't know, maybe, maybe not. I would argue that there were far more 
people who very vocally hated NSync, Spice Girls and the Macarena, then 
there were people who actually liked them. Those music acts were successful 
for a short while (at least for their labels), but I don't know about 
popular. Disliking and making fun of them was certainly very, very popular - 
far more popular than actually listening to them, from everything I could 
tell.

> Make a crappy product, and many  people won't buy your next one.  Look how 
> hard Vista hit Microsoft despite  their huge marketing machine.

Well, in many ways, Microsoft is unpopular ;) Although they're really a bit 
of an odd beast: They're heavily hated, but also heavily used. You could say 
they're both popular and unpopular at the same time.

And I don't know about "make a crappy product, and many people won't buy 
your next one": Vista didn't seem to prevent people from buying Win7 en 
masse.

> But I think you would agree the truly great free products/software don't 
> have a problem with marketing because growth today is viral when someone 
> finds something that is awesome, free or not.
>

True, but there's still a lot of difficulty in getting that viral ball 
rolling in the first place, it has to reach a certain critical mass first. D 
had faced an uphill battle for mindshare for a long time and the viral 
effect is only now starting to produce results.

>
> I think most good products are labors of love, even ones that are not 
> free.

Agreed.

> But if something is good, and people will pay  for it, why wouldn't you 
> want to charge for it so you can continue doing  it?  I don't understand 
> the thought process that necessarily links love  for a job or quality of 
> art to working for free.

In many cases I agree, but sometimes the market just isn't there, or maybe 
it's something that would just be very difficult to market as a commercial 
offering. In those cases getting it used by more than a handful of people 
(if any) requires it be free. For instance, the market for commercial 
languages is pretty much dead. D's reference compiler *needed* to be free or 
else it never would have gotten serious attention.

Or it could be a vehicle for something else: Like how MS doesn't even charge 
for their compilers (just their IDEs and platforms) because their real 
products are their platforms. Same with Apple and the iTunes software: it's 
free to help boost iPod and music/video sales.

(Of course, there is still room for commercial compilers: like the Intel 
C/C++ one, because it supposedly produces far better optimized code than the 
free C/C++ compilers. But a language that doesn't have at least some good 
free compiler is doomed to failure these days.)