Phil Osborn spewed:
| Funny, most of the professional developers I have known over the years
| consider MS/DOS - Windows to be an unbelievable kludge.
First of all, Windows on MS/DOS *was* a kludge, but that hasn't existed
since 3.1. All of MS' 32-bit operating systems are *actually* operating
systems, the DOS infrastructure is *minimal*. In NT and 2000 DOS is
non-existent.
MS-oriented developers are the workhorse of the development community.
Sure, talk to Java and C developers (I was one) and you'll hear a different
viewpoint - inferiority complex. With the advent of COM, there is not one
real benefit to using even C++ over VB for app development (of course you
get some performance benefit in some cases - solution, write a C++ COM
object for those situations and call it from anywhere). With VB or any
derived tools (i.e. ASP), a developer can be 2-3 times as productive than
with any of the aforementioned languages. This is due in part to A) the
APIs available to all of MS' products, which are as powerful, if not more
so, than open source, B) the amazing cross-functional IDEs (Integrated
Development Environments), and C) MS' excellent developer support network.
The problem here is that the dot-com "revolution" has validated
hackers-gone-"professional"-developers who believe that nobly writing for
open source software justifies constant troubleshooting and maintenance.
When your burn rate is over $55,000/day, you cannot afford to write things
more than once - and we don't. The days of building amazingly complex
scientific and enterprise applications on UNIX should be over. There are
better alternatives now.
And what about the
| market itself? It was specifically Bill Gates who pushed us into the
| software marketing model that still prevails - where the software
developer
| gets a few pennies on the dollar
I'm not quite sure which developers you're talking about, but I am sure it's
beside the point. Microsoft's products help businesses succeed and
consumers consume, what more can you ask for?
, while most of the money goes to marketing,
| and the end-buyer really has little clue as to product suitability or
| reliability.
Man - have you really spent a lot of time in X-Windows? Suitability? for
the common Joe? Come on. I'd be suprised if you could install Linux on a
new box and have XFree86 running in less than 5 attempts.
Read Steven Levy's "Hackers." We could have had a model more
| like the LINUX - open-source, peer-reviewed system, where lousy software
is
| caught before it ever made it to the shelf, and the money mostly goes
| directly to the creators, and solid products cost a fraction of the
Windows
| equivalent.
|
How very ideal - wake up man.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:12:52 MDT