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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: KDE Mindshare (or the lack thereof)
From:       Matthias Ettrich <ettrich () troll ! no>
Date:       1999-03-05 21:46:34
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On Fri, 05 Mar 1999, Prasanth Kumar wrote:
[snip]

>I was at the Linux World Expo and KDE was the desktop environment of
>choice in
>a great many booths. The caldera booth was one of the most crowded
>booths when
>they demoed their new Open Linux 2.2 on which KDE is the desktop
>environment.
>Their new Linux installer which I understand Trolltech assisted in
>creating is
>quite a masterpiece which a qt based user interface. It even lets you
>play
>tetris while the install is in progress! I think the new Open Linux will
>significantly boost Caldera market position and in turn KDE.


I (of course :-) agree that this is one of the most important news for Linux
from the LinuxWorldExpo. So do serious journalists and I'm sure they will write
about it. But isn't it strange that the Installer wasn't mentioned at all on
one of the geek sites that reported about the LinuxWorldExpo, for example
slashdot? Why do I get the feeling that this was different if not Caldera but
RH wrote it?

KDE as an application development framework is the basis for a big number of
high quality applications  (have you seen the midi sound system or the vector
graphic tool killustrator that can even read WMF files, just to mention two?)
We even have a pretty up-to-date web browser, dubbed the konquerer, including a
decent from-scratch java script implementation.

That someone dares to position a panel and a filemanager (that was just ported
to GTK) written in good-old C as a more modern competitior to a succesful
object-orientated application development framework is a bit cheeky. One of my
favorites is all that talk about a printing architecture, while KDE simply
prints from the very beginning.

>
>Furthermore, I find that a lot of new Linux users are partial to KDE
>since it
>has a lot of elements of the Windows environment they are familiar with.
>Slashdot may be somewhat hostile to KDE but there a lots of quiet new
>and
>experienced Linux users out there who enjoy KDE.
>users

And many developers too, which is crucial for the ongoing sucess of the
project.  Let me add one more thing regarding the programming language.

I think we could proudly stress the fact that we are using the industry leading
object orientated language (C++) for GUI development! C++ in combination with
libraries such as Qt and the STL offers a much higher function point value. In
fact, one line C++/Qt compares to 10-20 lines ordinary C-code. This ratio can
be even better for GUI programs, since OO-principles apply almost perfect
here. 

I really cannot understand that people who consider themselves good C
programmers state in public that C++ was hard to learn. Once you understood
what object orientation means (which is necessary to write GUIs) all you need
to learn are 7 more keywords:
        class
        public
        protected
        private
        new
        delete
        virtual

Keep in mind that C++ is a C-compatible language, it's meant to provide object 
orientation for those who already know C. When using a new library, a
programmers usually learns several hundred new function names, so why are these
7 words so complicated? One might argue that C++ supports many more things in
addiion to these keywords. Of course it does, for example it adds some new
syntactial rules and allows fancy advanced stuff like operator overloading. But
if you are a C programmer it is possible to use just a small subset of C++'
features. Both KDE and Qt supports this. Porting C programs to KDE therefore
is a piece of cake (again: that's one of the major points of C++!).

John Maddog Hall once said: "If your secretary claims that switching from
MS-Word to StarWriter is too difficult...... fire her, she's too stupid". 
I would do the same with these programmers ;-)


Matthias

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