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Comment by tmurray | Hacker News Reader

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tmurray·

>> 20 years of legacy, needs a reboot and major simplification pass

This was attempted. It failed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Longs_Peak_and_OpenGL_3....

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Mainly because the CAD industry refuse to move forward.

Mainly because design by massive committee doesn't work. It gets you supremely useless things like HTML5 canvas.

Can you explain the uselessness of HTML5 canvas? I've found some uses for it ...

The HTML5 canvas was created by Apple alone for use in their “Dashboard” product, and later ported to their Safari browser. Then other browsers decided to adopt it as well, because it supported a number of use cases which the browsers didn’t have another good solution for.

This is pretty much the opposite of “design by committee”.

Yeah, if only the HTML5 canvas was "designed by comittee" (it was not, it was an Apple design) and it was in any way useless (huh? what's the problem with it?)

I don't get it: here's what the Wikipedia currently says:

> To support backwards compatibility, the old state based API would still be available, but no new functionality would be exposed via the old API in later versions of OpenGL. This would have allowed legacy code bases, such as the majority of CAD products, to continue to run while other software could be written against or ported to the new API.

CAD dinosaurs would still have their old API. What was the matter, then?

Because then the Old API would no longer be developed. And CAD industry dont want to port the application to a whole new API.

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