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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#491

Post by JimDabell »

afavour wrote: post #467
jasode wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared. The "real world" has 2 types of file formats: (1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common…

I’d argue a good comparison here is HTTPS. Everyone decided it would be good for sites to move over to serving via HTTPS so browsers incentivised people to move by gating newer features to HTTPS only. They could have easily done the same with XHTML had they wanted.

The opportunities to fix this were pretty abundant. For instance, it would take exactly five words from Google to magically make a vast proportion of web pages valid XHTML:

> We rank valid XHTML higher

It doesn’t even have to be true!

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#492

Post by pessimizer »

lifty wrote: post #460
znpy wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drama has killed the technological progress in open source, if you ask me. Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the corporate world is light-years ahead.

It is a fundamental constraint of consensus based organizations. You need hierarchy to move faster but that has other disadvantages.

You don't need hierarchy, but you need some sort of process. "Consensus-based" just means that the loudest and most enduring shouters get their way, and when their way fails spectacularly, they leave in a huff (taking their work with them, badmouthing the project, and likely starting a fork that will pull more people out of the project and confuse potential users who just bail on trying either.)

Those people need to be pushed out early and often. That's what voting is for. You need a supermajority to force an end to discussion, and a majority to make a decision. If you hold up the discussion too long with too slim a minority, the majority can fork your faction out of the group. If the end of debate has been forced, and you can't work with the majority, you should leave yourself.

None of this letting the bullies get their way until everything is a disaster, then splitting up anyway stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#494

Post by ndiddy »

Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

> MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together about how to install and configure things. Probably would have eased the tradition to mobile. A version was actually shipped to developers, but it had to be covered up to justify the bailout of Next by Apple to get Steve Jobs.

You have things backwards. The Copland project was horribly mismanaged. Anybody at Apple who came up with a new technology got it included in Copland, with no regard to feature creep or stability. There's a leaked build floating around from shortly before the project was cancelled. It's extremely unstable and even using basic desktop functionality causes hangs and crashes. In mid-late 1996, it became clear that Copland would never ship, and Apple decided the best course of action was to license an outside OS. They considered options such as Solaris, Windows NT, and BeOS, but of course ended up buying NeXT. Copland wasn't killed to justify buying NeXT, Apple bought NeXT because Copland was unshippable.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#495

Post by PhilipRoman »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #384
watwut wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.

There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/ You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.

Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the original Flash because of superior security isolation mechanisms.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#497

Post by Havoc »

le-mark wrote: post #477
Havoc wrote: post #363

Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.

Not sure earlier versions, but Delphi 5 (~1999) definitely had all those. Plausible that it was added much later than in C/C++ world though

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#498

Post by nurbl »

motorest wrote: post #368
piskov wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason Typescript exists

> The same reason Typescript exists TypeScript exists for the same reason things like mypy exists, and no one in their right mind claims that python's openness should be threatened just because static typing is convenient.

Though in principle they serve similar purposes there are some big differences though. Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a different language from JS (guess it a superset?) and it being controlled by a large company could be considered problematic.

I suppose JS could go in the same direction and adopt the typing syntax from TS as a non-runtime thing. Then the typescript compiler would become something like mypy, an entirely optional part of the ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#499

Post by funflame »

kesor wrote: post #306

Geocities ; It was a "put your html here" Free web hosting back when people barely knew what html was. Today you have to be a rocket scientist to find a way to host a free static "simple" page online.

Neocities[0] is going strong, if you just want an alternative. Copy paste your html to the online editor or upload your files, and that's it.

[0] https://neocities.org/

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#500

Post by kanwisher »

Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

Word lens team was bought by google, its far better in google translate then the local app ever was. You could repeat the old app with a local LLM now pretty easily but it still won't be as close in quality as using google translate
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