Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 07:35:53 -0400 From: Alejandro Imass <aimass@yabarana.com> To: Quartz <quartz@sneakertech.com> Cc: Matthias Apitz <guru@unixarea.de>, FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: OT: The future of USENET? Message-ID: <CAHieY7SirM3Fu9NxZFrv6%2BaHMcs_2k2XGSU3cNhJ5zPKtnw%2Bew@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <5152D033.2030501@sneakertech.com> References: <20130327094925.GA2867@tinyCurrent> <5152CED5.20005@sneakertech.com> <5152D033.2030501@sneakertech.com>
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On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 6:55 AM, Quartz <quartz@sneakertech.com> wrote: >> Younger generations > > > In my experience, few people under the age of 30 have used usenet, and no > one under the age of 20 has even heard of it. > It's interesting to see all the re-inventions that occur all the time. It's basically the same stuff, just re-invented for a wider audience, lowering the barrier of entry in some cases and in others just plain stupidity and ignorance. Many times these re-inventions happen without even prior knowledge of what exists and other times are "simplified" forks, or robbed ideas that wind up being the same or worse than their original counterparts. Examples are in all areas of technology, and in society in general. For example, chat and instant messaging have always been avail for IRC users since the late eighties but have been re-invented in the late nineties with a bunch of incompatible and overlapping IM protocols. Blogs and forums are also re-inventions of older and in many cases more robust and versatile technologies like USENET and mailing lists. In many cases what I find that is a shame is that these re-inventions don't build on top of mature technologies but rather start out as simple things and then evolve to overly complex things without any elegance and that (as stated above) wind up being even more complex and generally much less elegant than their older counterparts. A good example is Windows and perhaps most of MS technology in general, with a few counted exceptions. In some cases the prior art in known quite well, take for example PHP which was originally written in Perl, then forked to a new language for whatever reasons, and the evolves to be as complex or worse than Perl itself, and after all these years it's still not a full-fledged and decent programming language. In some cases, the evolutionary line is actually positive, take for example Ruby. Yet in this case, Perl has continued to evolve quite well, as Larry Wall well put it: "The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. (On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.)". One could go on forever with thousands of example, but it's all about evolution and you can only evaluate these things with time. Who knows, maybe USENET, IRC. etc. will continue to evolve and survive in niches, or someday make a great comeback when other options have run their course and have gone extinct. Best, -- Alejandro
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