McMaster University Creates Open Source eHealth Records System

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 01:24:04PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
> 
> | No, if you design it (rather than evolve it) then it should be not a
> | piece of crap at the start.  Recovering a piece of crap into a working
> | system hardly ever happens.  You just end up with a bloated useless
> | bigger piece of crap.
> 
> That is mostly true.  At least I want to believe it.
> 
> There are cases where communities have put in enough work to get
> useful results out of crap.  It offends my sence of what is right and
> proper, but it does happen.
> 
> The amount of effort put into DOS / Win 3.x / Win 9x / Win NT... was
> disproportionate to the results, but results there were.
> 
> Also: sometimes an artifact like that system can nucleate a community
> and the community can go on to do good things.
> 
> Both these quibbles are long shots and don't actually disagree with
> you.
> 
> | Besides anything written in java can't be rescued without a rewrite in
> | a useful efficient language.
> 
> Are you sure?  That seems like a strong claim.  Not that I'm a Java
> fan -- I've been resisting learning it since slightly before it was
> released to the world.
> 
> Do you feel the same way about C#?

C# looks like a better language, but I have never used it or even had
to deal with it.  At least it seems that .net applications actually work
when installed.  Java applications often don't work, are a nightmare
to get running, figuring out which java version they require, etc.
Complete mess.  That that's without having to actually try writing
java code.  I hate object oriented programming in most cases.  Making
everything a class is just stupid and not productive and certainly
doesn't make for readable or maintainable code.  I agree with Dijkstra
on that.

I found some nice (funny) quotes on java (and C++ and perl and such) here:
http://www.sysprog.net/?tag=java-quotes

> Here's a link to an article from yesterday's Globe and Mail.  I don't
> think that a realistic analysis is possible for a reporter.
>  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/oscar-shows-electronic-health-system-doable/article1320727/
> (I don't know when that link will cease to work.)
> It does touch on the issue of open source.

Well given that the london stock exchange (and apparently a bunch of other
stock exchanges) are willing to run on a linux based system (although
I doubt they intend to open source the actual application code), and
believe that having control over the source and development of their
complete system is a benefit, I don't think open source is looking so bad.
Having something that works and can be made to do what is needed is
actually better than having someone to blame when it doesn't work.
Strange how many people just worry about having someone to blame for
failures.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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