May 05 2008
Did Microsoft Drop the Ball with Developers?
Peter Bright has written a multi-page post on Ars Technica explaining the myriad technical failures of Microsoft’s tools strategy that have driven him off the Windows platform and over to OS/X. It’s just been slash-dotted and is getting the predictable level of commentary from the nominally MS-bashing crowd over there.
Ok, let’s leave aside for the moment the simple fact that if Mr. Bright was free to drop Windows and move over to OS/X he’s not working on anything that matters very much. I mean that he doesn’t have a lot of people depending on what he’s doing, otherwise he wouldn’t be so free to make that choice. Whatever. If he’d rather work on a Mac then who the hell am I to comment? But along the way he feels the need to rant a little on the “miserable” Windows development experience on .Net, and that’s where he goes straight off the rails.
Not that he was really on the rails to begin with. Before getting to his laundry list of .Net’s weaknesses Mr. Bright felt the need to categorize the world of software developers according to his own schema. In that world, there are three types of programmers: Excel-wielding macro-cowboy pseudo-coders in business suits; lazy, uninspired cube drones writing clunky, misshapen enterprise applications that nobody really cares about; and those conscientious, intelligent, detail-oriented super coders like himself. Hilariously, he characterizes that last group as the people who might use C++ or “whatever beret-wearing funky scripting language was à la mode at the time.” Like anyone who uses C++ regularly considers a funky scripting language to be real programming (”Look, Bjarne! Anything can be an object!”). Hey, if we push hard enough maybe we can cram the mainly gray-haired, uber-serious C++ programmer community into the same can with all those cool, messy-mopped script-slinging web-onauts. Maybe, but I doubt it.
