People doing DTP with Calamus on their Ataris stuck around for a long time after the systems weren't used for much else – MIDI tooling excepted, of course.
On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison.
For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature-wise, everything seemed to converge during the 90s, so "having" to use Word instead of e.g. WordPerfect was less and less of an issue.
With some exceptions of course, most famously GRRM and other people who got into things very early sticking with the first thing they learned (i.e. WordStar), or apparently some journalists being really into XyWrite.
It's not surprising that people who write professionally would learn one tool to the point it gets out of the way and then not want to change. It's not just sticking with the first thing they learned - there's a constant churn of "tools for distraction-free writing" that address some of the complaints that people that still use older word processors have about more up-to-date systems.
Once you know the pattern, every so often you'll see a piece about a writer or journalist and the funky software they use and you can just wait for it... it's going to be Wordstar, XyWrite, one of the XEDIT editors, sometimes Wordperfect for DOS. Rarely Word for DOS. Neal Stephenson uses emacs, but he's an outlier in a lot of ways. I think there was a piece linked here recently by a journalist who uses the macOS TextEdit for note-taking, which dates back to NeXSTEP. (not exactly the same thing, but consider)
Late 1990s supposedly a considerable extension on use of Macs for DTP was that Quark could get significantly automated with AppleScript, and some publishing houses had non-trivial workflows done that way to reduce time spent on preparation.
One thing I always liked about some older languages was being able to have blanks in identifiers. Although I see that they actually managed to invent a new stropping variant that doesn't work with that… For the "kids"…
That's a cruel alternate universe, I would've hoped that Motif being in use by more people than just the devs of one homebrew Unix desktop would mean that we wouldn't have suffered through that much versionitis.
The version number was just a joke. But if the "standard unix gui toolkit" was under an open source license back in the 1990s, I am sure people would have run with that rather than inventing something else.
from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful
it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`
I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)
I'm also pretty sure that there was an "Elixir" in IT before there was the language said framework is written in… I mean, given that the letter "X" is in both Unix and X11, I'm pretty sure most words containing it have already been used once or twice.
(I still think they should've stuck with "Firebird", little danger of confusing a browser with a database system mostly used by Delphi devs)
Seems everyone has. Which is weird, given how bad everything looks despite this focus.
I'm not sure what's going on in the design world. I mean, of course there's the influence of the web design spheres. The web didn't have the GUI standards that e.g. Macs were known for. In the beginning, they couldn't emulate the desktops. Toolkits like ExtJS tried, but you stated with the basic problem that you didn't know what desktop you wanted to emulate. Windows? Mac?
By the time the browser caught up, the damage already had been done, and the stop-gap solutions and styles more suitable for ads created a "web style". Flashy, flat, deserts of whitespace. The aesthetic stranglehold this had then not only persisted, but crossed over first into mobile (the somewhat standardized look & feel of early iOS quickly vanished), then the desktop.
And now nobody knows where they're going, despite having more people solely focused on "UX" than ever before. But you need to do something to justify your position/salary, and that's how we get the Microsoft/Apple designs of the last decade or so. And not having any ideas beyond type systems or init replacements, the open source world just emulates that.
For a short while, I ran the Eumel operating system and wrote an application in Elan. Among other interesting properties, files weren't saved, but were checkpointed by the OS. I enjoyed this exercise, although Eumel remained a very small niche.
A lot of C# and Java code is oriented towards web backends, too. Which are quite big and complex. So it seems natural that languages in the same design space (trad OO) converge on similar features. I think the only exception these days is Go.
I think these days you could change "You can write Fortran in any language" to "You can structure your code like Spring in any language"…
On the other hand, there you didn't have that many powerful packages on any system, besides Quark & the various Adobe tools du jour everything paled in comparison.
For word processing, being forced to use Word was/is usually worse than for DTP, though. But feature-wise, everything seemed to converge during the 90s, so "having" to use Word instead of e.g. WordPerfect was less and less of an issue.
With some exceptions of course, most famously GRRM and other people who got into things very early sticking with the first thing they learned (i.e. WordStar), or apparently some journalists being really into XyWrite.
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