[asterisk-users] Upgrade to Asterisk 1.4 - it's one year's old!

[Ira]

At 10:14 AM 12/15/2007, you wrote:
>So Digium, (I address the company since Tilghman now works for you) do
>you have any plans to query the user community and determine what a
>typical end user of the product needs? With the knowledge and skill that
>exists in  your organization it would seem trivial to put something in
>place to allow user feedback not only developer feedback for release
>direction.
>
>My 2 cents, ok 25 cents,
>Dave

I have a somewhat different opinion. I once used a product where upon 
announcing the features of the next release to a rather disenchanted 
audience pointed out that the product now contained what you needed 
to get your job done, and not necessarily what you wanted. The people 
unwilling to learn walked away disappointed, those willing to think 
about what they'd been given were constantly surprised at the 
newfound capabilities of the product.  People always ask for stuff 
they don't need that they're unwilling to figure out how to do 
themselves. A perfect example is the new dial plan function array(), 
it has nothing to do with arrays, doesn't accomplish anything useful 
that couldn't have been done by allowing commas in set(), or calling 
it setmany(), and means if real arrays ever get added to the language 
we have to come up with new function names while the obvious one has 
already been taken to mean something not related.

I know lots of people have thousands of hours in dial plans to solve 
specific problems, but personally I'd have no problem if the 
deprecated the whole dial plan script language and started over. 
Well, I'd be happy if they came up with an elegant language with 
functions, parameters and proper variable scoping while getting rid 
of line numbers and all the rest of the baggage that shouldn't have 
been there in the first place. AEL is an attempt to solve some of 
that, but as it's just a precompiler to the underlying language it 
has limitations that shouldn't be there.

I'm sure that's not a popular opinion as people don't tend to like 
change, but in the long run it would make Asterisk a better product. 
Sadly it's probably already too late.

I still cringe whenever I see people acknowledge line numbers in new books.

Ira