From: David Golden (david.golden at domain oceanfree.net)
Date: Thu 28 Jun 2001 - 17:08:33 IST
Stephen_Reilly at domain dell.com wrote:
> welcome to the wonderful world of high level programming/application
>development !
>
> wish and expectk, could anyone pay me to write apps like that?
>
There's actually a fair bit of money in the bespoke applications market,
and it's usually made by short-term contractors using high-level
languages for component-based
programming, like tcl/tk, perl, visual basic (bleurgh! - vb is crap, but
it allows half-trained monkeys
to get things done - not necessarily done well, but done.) and Java
(Check out NetBeans/Forte
or IBM Visual Age for Java some time - you can write immensely powerful
Java apps by dropping
Beans onto a canvas and drawing lines between them to string 'em together )
The good thing is, possible unlike programmers in proprietary software
houses, people
will likely want these "duct tape" bespoke applications written for the
forseeable
future, and Open Source makes it easier, not harder, to write them.
You can get impressive results, very quickly (provided you have even a
vague notion of what you're doing).
>
> I think I'll just dedicate the rest of my life to hunting out these
>handy little programs and things that make linux so great !
>
You'd better be planning on living a very long time - there's a hell of
a lot of 'em :-)
If you ever read through the package descriptions of all the .rpms (or
.debs) of a distro,
you find an amazing amount of wierd, but cool, stuff. I remember when I
first found
xspringies hidden away :-) Spent hours making little skeletal mechanisms
dance erratically
around the screen (must write a 3D version some time... I think there's
a java version
somewhere)
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