<Are TcL/Tk, Java, and Javascript applications or programming languages?
Programming languages, with a veritable plethora of associated applications,code generators, gui builders, and hooks to a wide variety of existing applications.>
That is irrelevant, they are not applications, they are languages, and you can not consider the support products a "plethora" if you are comparing them relative to the tools and products available to the Wintel platform.
Does NSCP own them?
I'm more interested in source code availability than who owns my tools. I don't really care who 'owns' the stuff I use, as long as I can use it, and it works.>
That's the problem, you are looking at it as a programmer and an end user. I am sure NSCP's institutional shareholders care "who owns the stuff" as in who directly profits form thier sale and upgrade.
<Surely you're not implying that MSFT owns c++ and perl, are you? BTW - perl is very tightly integrated with Tcl/Tk, and a huge variety of commercial and non-commercial dbase stuff.>
No, but I am implying that MSFT owns Visual C++, Visual InterDev as development platforms, not to mention Visual VB, Visual Foxpro, I can go on for a while. They also own quite a few languages, such as VB, VBscript, etc. That means they derive royalties, licensing revenue and attract a developer base for thier end user and code products while they are making this licensing revenue. NSCP can not say the same about anything, unitl they come out with Visual Javascript 1.0, then it will be a 1.0 product, quite immature.
<No, unless I've been misinformed, they are code generators and gui builders, which exist widely for the things I mentioned.>
You have been misinformed. Excel 8.0 comes ready to run out of the box, and is very easily extended by manually writing code or using its internal code generator which generates VBA code (VB4 equivalent), and/or inserting active x objects (drag and drop). I have a whole website full of the stuff. If you don't want to do any of that, simply pick a ready made template and hit "save as" on the menu bar to ftp it in native format or html to any web site or FTP site, it is internet aware, so each and every Office app also doubles as a browser and a composer.
<I can do the same thing with Java, Perl, Tcl/Tk, and Javascript. Not only that, but I'll have control over the way my objects are put together. >
You are a programmer, and I am not (I really don't know what the hell I am doing, but the point and click stuff works). Given an hour, I bet I can make a much more functional (not to mention prettier) intranet app out of Excel 8.0 than you can out of your raw code any time. |
