Larry Heimendinger, president of Nantucket Corp, was in the UK recently attending the Nantucket European Developers Conference. During the Gulf crisis it is a remarkable feat in itself that a company chief flew in from California, a state where people are so paranoid they are buying gas masks. However, it is an act representative of Heimendinger’s Mephistophelic attitude to life, the universe and Bill Gates. We begin conversation with the tiresome – to Heimendinger – subject of Ashton-Tate Corp, a firm for which, Heimendinger is quick to point out, he does not work.
Complete surprise
He thinks that the the ruling that upheld Fox Software Inc’s right to use chunks of dBase III Plus with impunity (CI No 1,577) came as a complete surprise to Ashton-Tate. As for that ruling’s effects on the industry, he thinks that it freed Fox to pursue FoxPro, made a lot of people in Taiwan happy as they can now make up copies of dBase, and gave an impetus to Borland International Inc, Microsoft Corp and Lotus Development Corp to implement dBase-like components – its effect on Nantucket is zero. Furthermore as the case was decided on a procedural issue, it has no ramifications for industry-wide issues. As for the little matter of SQL for personal computers, Heimendinger maintains that it is not a factor in the industry at all so far. He believes that a couple of thousand copies have been distributed by companies like Oracle Corp, Novell Inc and Gupta Technologies, but that these are mostly test copies with virtually none in production so far. In Heimendinger’s words it’s the biggest non-event in the last two years, which has saved Ashton-Tate a good deal of embarrassment. That being so, it seems odd that Nantucket is currently developing SQL drivers. Not so, says Heimendinger, as these drivers are for use on personal computer clients, not personal computer servers, so that users can tap into whatever database they want on a mini or mainframe without having to learn a new access method. When it comes to the presence of OS/2 in the market what can a body do but laugh. In most people’s opinion Microsoft has seriously confused the OS/2 issue with Windows and the announcement of the new 32-bit operating system MS-DOS 6.0 with Windows. However, as Heimendinger says hats off to Bill Gates for getting someone to buy one thing to buy another thing to buy the thing that he originally wanted to sell them. He believes that OS/2 will survive in one guise or another, while the market for Unix will shrink. He points to the weakness of Unix in the commercial market, arguing that accounting is only done in the Unix environment via dumb terminals. He seems surprised that people might find this a contrary viewpoint. He continues by saying that Unix runs counter to what computers are all about at the moment. Users want ease of use and connectability – Unix offers an old-fashioned master and slave approach to computing. He is not thrown by the commitment of huge budget-wielding governments to the Unix environment, retorting that governments are remarkably well-attuned to the needs of 25 years ago. However his most telling reason for thinking Unix will be a passing fad is because few software companies can afford to convert, develop and write software for such a tiny, differentiated market. When it comes to Clipper 5.0, Heimendinger believes there are no similarities to low end languages like Paradox or dBase.
– By Katy Ring –
He believes that Clipper should come to mind at the same time as C or Cobol or Pascal and that it is the obvious choice for companies interfacing personal computers with mainframes and a non-personal computer data processing environment. Heimendinger maintains that both C and Clipper are growing in the market and gaining market share. He thinks, along with many in the language market, that C wouldn’t be growing so fast if people realised that its description as a portable language is largely myth, since the programmer still has to write all the various interfaces and, furthermore, the application has to be written to serve the
lowest common denominator, which leads to compromises and unsatisfied users. Despite the runaway success of the Micro Focus Plc Cobol/2 Workbench, Heimendinger thinks that Cobol programmers don’t like using personal computers and that they will find it easier to learn Clipper than C. Whereas Heimendinger had no qualms in dismissing Unix and OS/2 Cobol programming, one subject that he has a lot of time for is object-oriented technology. Nantucket is fully committed to delivering an object-oriented language. Indeed, Clipper 5.0 has some pre-defined objects so that users can begin to get used to the concept and culture of object-oriented programming. Heimendinger is certainly enthusiastic about the concept but he says what will really give object-oriented technology credibility is a good robust application for the finance or accountancy sector rather than the cutesy things on Windows and Presentation Manager.
Not homogeneous
However, Heimendinger is scathing about the object-oriented community which, he says, is simply interested in improving the concept theoretically instead of viewing it as a means of developing applications that are more reliable. He concedes that the community is not homogeneous, saying that Clipper will offer a stable object-oriented environment between the procedural celibacy of Eiffel and Smalltalk and the promiscuity of C++, which does not impose object-oriented techniques on a programmer. Object-oriented technology is one of the four legs of Nantucket Future Technology development strategy that kicked off with the release of Clipper 5.0. The second is to offer Clipper for Windows, Presentation Manager, the Apple Computer Inc Mac and the Go Corp user interfaces; the third addresses database access so that the language interface will be sufficient to describe the database, and last but by no means least, Clipper code compatibility with all these developments. The code compatibility means that users will be able to write in Clipper to generate object-oriented commands: the preprocessor will translate the code into function calls automatically. If sales of Clipper 5.0 are anything to go by – Nantucket’s revenues rose by 100% in the past six months – Nantucket Future Technology should keep users of Clipper happy over the next few years, and as long as Heimendinger is at the helm they are sure to be kept well-entertained as well.
