Slashdot Log In
Joel On Microsoft's API Mistakes
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jun 16, 2004 05:31 PM
from the microsoft-is-a-big-software-company dept.
from the microsoft-is-a-big-software-company dept.
AceMarkE writes "Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software has posted an article entitled "How Microsoft Lost the API War". He covers why the Win32 API is important to Microsoft, what they've done to keep it working, why Microsoft's switch to the .Net platform is both a good and bad idea, and why he feels the browser will be the real future of application development. Definitely worth a read no matter what your opinion of Microsoft is."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Joel On Microsoft's API Mistakes
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 690 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Re:.NET & C# (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday January 23 2006, @12:19PM)
I program in Objective-C, using Cocoa libs under Mac OS X. ;-)
What's amazing is that Java combined with the hack-y nature of the Win32 APIs finally forced Microsoft to create something that's still not as good as NeXTStep was 15 years ago, and probably isn't ( yet ) as good as Java ( it's just optimized for it's single target platform ).
I'll leave for those who care to debate Java vs .NET. For me, that's a debate that is pointless unless .NET somehow becomes cross-platform, at which point I expect Bill Gates to burst into flames.
Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://inglorion.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 06 2005, @07:17AM)
1. Web clients vs. rich user interfaces
I have long wondered why web interfaces aren't much good. The technologies are there; Java applets, Flash, Python could do it, JavaScript could with a few extensions, XUL, heck, even C, compiled on the fly. All these stop just short of integrating well with the web and the client platform. Why? Why has nobody managed (or tried) to take the last step? Even
2. API changes
Contrary to Microsoft's, UNIX and POSIX APIs have been very stable. There have been extensions, but the bulk of what used to work still works. This makes the case for switching over to standard technologies, now that Microsoft is pushing you to switch anyway.
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, and HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. The web does a magnificent work in what it was intended to do. The web sucks at extensions. Some reasons:
1) No sessions. No good way to store state. Cookies, etc are ugly kludges.
2) Designed for unidirectional, or, at best, asymmetric data transfers. There isn't a really good way to upload data.
3) Privacy and encryption are an add-on, not built in.
4) No widgets other than those in the browser.
The solution for all these problems have been to create plug-ins, applets, javascript, flash, etc. Since these aren't part of the standard, they are all different and incompatible among them. There isn't any standard beyond http and html. Or, rather, there are too many standards, one for each vendor...
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://inglorion.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 06 2005, @07:17AM)
Yes, obviously, but then, _how come_ there are no standard protocols that fix this? Many people perceive the need. Users feel the difference between web apps and native apps (Joel is right, for existing apps, users don't care. Now try writing a usable word processor using HTTP and HTML...).
I once posted a message to some mailing list requesting support for sockets in JavaScript. With that, you could interact with the server _without_ reloading the page, have the server push events to you, rather than periodically poll for them, speak any protocol from a web app, etc. The reply I got was that it wasn't going to happen, citing security issues and bloat. Yeah, that's why Java applets do have socket support, and Java is of course a prime example of elegant, light-weight software. *cough* *cough*
As for lack of standardization; we have CORBA which is very standardized and very universal. If you want something lighter, there is RPC. ZeroInstall provides a nice way to "run" native software off the web. Java has gotten pretty usable. WHERE ARE THE GOOD WEB HOSTED APPS?!?
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://nerds.palmdrive.net/)
Security settings should force you to communicate only with your originating server and port. Hence a Socket is way "too free" for that.
And if the user is using a proxy, then what? How can you access your original server? You have to go through the Proxy.
No, a real way would be to have access to an object a bit like java.net.HttpURLConnection. Such an object would be trivial to write, with two features in mind:
1. It should use the browser's connections settings (proxies, etc...) and caching capabilities.
2. It should enforce that the URLs accessed are issued from the same server/port as the script requesting it.
Socket is way too low level.
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not exactly sockets, but you can do an awful lot with the XmlHttpRequest object. Microsoft did it first, I think, and Mozilla has a complete clone. Check out the XulPlanet documentation [xulplanet.com], the Mozilla documentation [elemental.com], the Microsoft documentation [microsoft.com] or this tutorial called Using the XML HTTP Request Object [jibbering.com]
The XmlHttpRequest object is poorly named. Really you're just making an HTTP request, and if the response happens to be XML, there are convenience functions for getting a fully-parsed DOM view of the document. If the response is anything else (plain text, JavaScript, Perl, HTML, etc.) you can do what you want with it, including calling eval() on it from a JavaScript script. You can do synchronous (blocking) or asynchronous (non-blocking) calls to your web server, and either be notified of completion by a callback for non-blocking calls, or just treat it like a function call for blocking calls. It's quite handy, and we have a project at work that makes extensive use of this technique. We have a "thick" or "rich" client application that runs in the web browser. Our client looks like a native application--it has table widgets, with clickable headers that resort the columns, it has a tree widget that looks like the tree in Windows Explorer, it supports drag-and-drop and custom context-menus, and if you open our application in a chrome-free browser window, it's almost possible to forget it's not native (the speed is usually what gives it away, the GUI is a little sluggish...). It works equally well in Mozilla, Firefox, IE 5.5+, and Netscape 7.1+ on Windows 9x, 2000, XP, and many flavours of GNU/Linux (tested on Gentoo and Redhat 7.3, and 8.0 using GNOME, KDE, and some kind of *Box wm). Well, "equally well" is a bit of a stretch. IE's implementation of the DOM is dog slow, so some things run a bit faster in the Gecko-based browsers, but all functionality is equally available in all the configurations listed above. We've managed to stay standards-compliant for the most part, and have abstracted away the quirks in IE, so as soon as Konqueror, Opera and $YOUR_FAVOURITE_BROWSER fully support JavaScript 1.5, DOM 2.0, and CSS 2.0, our app will work in your browser, too. (I don't know which parts these browsers are missing, so maybe our app already works there.)
The only remaining hurdle is to convince management that it should be open-sourced so that other people can use it, too. If you can't wait, you might want to check out SourceForge. There are some other widget kits available for building browser-based apps. We chose not to go with them because, at the time, they were too Alpha-ish, and we disagreed with some design decisions. Our decision not to use those projects has not been revisited for a while though, now that we are rather comitted to our in-house implementation, so things may have improved significantly since the last time I had a look.
Also, if you're going to actually build any significant JavaScript apps (we have more than 40k loc that turns out to be more than 1 meg of JavaScript to download), I highly recommend JSDoc [sourceforge.net]. The main developer, Gabriel, has been very responsive and helpful, and the documentation that his scripts produce is excellent. Especially considering he builds JSDoc in his spare time, I can't compliment his work enough. Now that our codebase is too large for me to keep it all in my head, the API has saved a lot of my time.
Ian
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, supporting Netscape 4.7 would probably make me murderous, too. JavaScript as a language is actually really nice. It's object-oriented, but the type system is very flexible (they're aren't really any classes, per se, they're all "prototypes"), functions are objects, so you can pass them around, and closures are possible, which gives you lots of power. I agree that differences between browser implementations can cause some grief, but we've been able to abstract away most of those differences, so there isn't a single line of code in the entire code base that makes any reference to the browser string. Of course, this means that if you try to use the latest version of Konqueror that I tried, things just blow up, because we assume your browser can handle our app, and that version of Konq can't, but we're developing for a captive audience, and we can almost dictate browser versions, so that's been a bit of a saving grace. One nice thing is that all the developers work on GNU/Linux, so it has to work in Moz for us to be able to develop, but the users all use IE, so it has to work there for us to sell it. This dichotomy (did I use that right?) has dictated that our framework must be cross-browser. If our code was littered with
I think we would have instigated a mass suicide a long time ago, but since we have almost no code like that, and since all such code is hidden in the equivalent of "library code", making new screens, or new functionality is pretty straight forward. I find the productivity to be pretty high, and the library has only been in development since August of 2003. Of course, I'm biased since I was one of the pilot developers, but the opinions of my coworkers seem to at least align with mine, even if they're not quite as enthusiastic.Ian
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.aktiom.net/)
MS has control over rich web interfaces being available because of this: the *vast* majority of browsers are IE [google.com]. So if MS doesn't allow rich web interfaces in IE, web developers won't attempt to make a web app that can't be used by the majority of users.
I think it's possible to get close to rich web apps using JavaScript, DHTML, and other technologies, but it's very painful for web developers to get it to work correctly across Firefox, IE, Safari, etc. For an example, see oddpost.com webmail [oddpost.com]. It's very rich, but only works in IE 5.5+.
$60/month Debian Linux Server [aktiom.net]
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday March 11 2007, @09:01PM)
Joel has explained the reason Internet Explorer's development hit a wall a year or two ago. All you people asking why Internet Explorer's standards compliance hasn't gotten any better, why it hasn't gotten tabbed browsing, etc, now you have your answer. It's a very good reason (for Microsoft), and it's obvious in retrospect, but I sure didn't think of it until I read these few sentences:
Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client.
Microsoft can't afford to make IE any better, because if was improved one or two generations more, the kinds of web applications that would become possible would make Windows irrelevant as a platform. Everyone would be developing for the web instead of Win32 or .NET or Avalon or whatever. Internet Explorer development has come to a screeching halt except for things which are absolutely necessary to avoid losing its #1 browser position (because for Microsoft the only thing worse than an improved IE is an improved Mozilla!). This is the reason why.
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://inglorion.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 06 2005, @07:17AM)
Some of the replies I have received in this thread show that XUL-capable browsers have already achieved a fearsome ability to present rich user interfaces. This means that MSIE not only lacks the usability features that other browsers provide, but also the base that some developers use for their applications. If Mozilla and web developers push hard enough, they might cause a revolution that forces users to upgrade to better browsers, and MSIE into compliance with XUL, rather than the rest of the world into compliance with Microsoft's XAML.
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://log.emmanuelebassi.net/)
You would be lucky if a GNOME app for GNOME 2.0 even compiles for 2.6. It will most certainly not run if it's already compiled.
I call for BS on this one. Now, if you'd have said "GNOME app for GNOME 1.4", then you'd have been right; but, you know: API breaking does happen, from time to time, especially when an API overpasses the point of being sucky enough to be unextensible.
On the other hand, a GNOME 2.0 app will run, without the need for recompilation, under GNOME 2.6. Flawlessy. In fact, I'm using apps written, tested and compiled with libraries released for GNOME 2.0 under GNOME 2.6.
Another point worth to be noted is that, under Un*x, the DLL Hell is a non-issue, as we've had libraries versioning since day 1. So, I might as well install multiple versions of a library, and yet do not have the need to recompile an application.
Re:Repeating my comment on OSNews... (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose it's just Murphy's law. There's two ways for programmers to interpret the version number on .so objects, so naturally they choose the disasterous way.
Hard to be a Mac user? (Score:5, Insightful)
No it isn't, it's easy to be a Mac (OS X) user. No Viruses, No Trojans, a sytem that stays up pretty much indefinitely, and great, great applications that do everythinbg I need and much more besides that I probably don't really need, if I'm honest. This old argument about Mac having no apps is very old, very tired, and very tiresome. Please stop.
Re:Hard to be a Mac user? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday June 08 2006, @07:07PM)
Like he said, *you* have everything *you* need, but the plethora of quite diverse and intensive applications that everyone *else* needs isn't there. Sorry, he's still right.
1. People seem to mix up the fact that just because a particular Windows application isn't available on Mac, that Mac users do without. As a rule, it's not the case.
2. What applications do the vast majority of Windows users use? Office, IE, and Outlook. Right? They are all available on Mac though there's little reason to use IE and Outlook. The one exception is Access. Is this a show stopper in the corporate and business world? Sometimes. In the home market? Rarely.
3. To the typical user -- geeks included -- the availability of more software on Windows just means there's more software they could use but don't. This is not a minor point; there's only so much software that any one person will want to use. I'd be curious to see if Windows users use more, less, or the same amount of software as Mac users.
4. While quality is often in the eye of the beholder, I for one still think that Windows software tends to be crappier than Mac software. Unfortunately, that crappiness seems to be spreading. Suffice it to say there are more ways to produce crappy software than good software and since Windows has so much more software available for it ...
It's not hard being a Mac user, certainly no harder than being a Windows users since the vast majority of users have a hard time using computers at all.
Try this perspective: as a longtime Mac user, I have a hard time using Windows because I can't find much high quality software that runs on Windows --even after several years. Stands to reason, doesn't it? Considering that all the major apps -- Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. -- were born on the Mac platform, you'd think developers would look to the Mac sometimes for how to do things right.
Re:Hard to be a Mac user? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday January 23 2006, @12:19PM)
It seems [apple.com] there may be a few [apple.com] applications [apple.com] for Mac OS X as well. More importantly, Objective-C and Cocoa are easy enough that more OS X programs are being made every day. Developers indeed. If the Linux community could get some standardizationg together and throw some effort behind GNUStep... sigh... that would be nice, too, but Apple's more likely to release OS X for Intel ( i.e. don't hold your breath ). GNUStep is getting closer, though...
If it weren't for guys like Joel with their "if it's not Microsoft it's just weird" attitude and willingness to spread MS FUD, users would have a lot more options, and more developers would be able to make a better living slinging more code for more platforms, rather than being forced to eat Microsoft's swill.
Re:Hard to be a Mac user? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.transit.hanse.de/)
MS Project and Visio. I need those day in, day out, and they're not available. Neither are apps that give me the same functionality. Let alone file format compatibility (yes I know it's MS fault). But the few alternatives I looked at were crashy, had an arcane user interface (neither proper Cocoa nor copied from the originals, just wierd), and simply lacking in functionality. Not that I would think that Project or Visio are the best possible apps in their space; they're just as sucky as most MS apps.
If you use computers professionally, and you need to work with people outside your own organization, then using a Mac is harder. Many problems are soluble, but there are problems to be solved.
But I agree with Joel's outlook: many apps will eventually move to the Web, and as Mozilla and WebKit/KHTML improve, all these troubles will disappear. Who knows, maybe Mac OS X Java support might push Java far enough to make it a viable desktop platform...
Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, I think breaking API compatibility is the only way for MS to actually fix the problems with Windows. A lot of the problem seems to be the large amount of old code and cruft that has been left in the name of backwards compatibility.
It's certainly a big risk to the Microsoft monopoly, but it's a necessary step for them. Now would be a good time for Linux to make a big move for the desktop.
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.crfh.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 14 2006, @02:47PM)
Apple, on the other hand, only broke the API once, with the transition from Classic to Cocoa (the MacOSX API), and even then, they did their best to maintain compatibility, with Carbon.
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://retiredmidn.blogspot.com/)
Wait; this is completely contrary to my experience. I worked on Lotus 1-2-3 for Mac, which was targeted at Mac OS 6 & 7 (7 was new when we shipped 1-2-3). 1-2-3 was written in C (actually Symantec's C++ subset) with some inline 68K assembly, and did some grotesque trap patching.
That 1-2-3 68K code runs under OS X on a PowerPC G5. Reliably. I still maintain spreadsheets that I update weekly.
As Joel's article pointed out, Microsoft has engaged in some amazing bend-over-backwards hackery to maintain backward compatibility. This echoes a Wall Street Journal article written about Windows NT development where Dave Cutler bragged about the number of programmers tasked with adding code to make certain "high profile" Windows 3.x apps run under NT.
By contrast, Apple, in the early releases of Mac OS, showed enough foresight to tell developers how to keep their code future-proof, and developers who adhered to those protocols (which were not all that restrictive) wrote apps that still run today, under an entirely new OS on an entirely different CPU.
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.nondot.org/~kungfoomaster | Last Journal: Monday February 12 2007, @02:58AM)
The fact that Microsoft is breaking backwards compatibility is the exact reason that Joel says they lost the API war.
Developers, more than anything else want a stable platform to develop for. Microsoft's top priority in the past was to provide a stable platform (stable in the sense that all old-code worked on the new platform). Developers are users too. I would be really pissed off if I upgraded some app and it wasn't able to work with my old data. Why is there a different expectation when I code for an API? Why should I have to rewrite my code because the vendor discovered some better way of doing it? I probably went to a lot of trouble to get that code working in the first place. Make sure it performs well, possibly works around a couple bugs that took me hours or days to figure out, and now the vendor comes along and breaks it and I have to learn some new way of doing it and deal with new, yet undiscovered bugs. fsck that. If it was an app, I would ditch it. If it was a platform and had a choice, I'd ditch that too.
What platform are people turning to? Joel's answer is the web because HTML/browser represents a very stable platform. I won't reiterate his arguments here. But, I do feel that he has a point. He is a smart guy, and I could see it come to pass. That doesn't necessarily mean it will. Smart people have been wrong before :)
With Joel's world view, how Linux will make inroads on the corporate desktop is simply by having a good web-browser and being free. Features on the client will become irrelevant.
All I can say is prediction is hard, especially when you are trying to predict the future.
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday August 18 2001, @11:04AM)
I agree with this, and I agree with Joel as well.
Maintaining reverse compatibility is the right thing to do today. It's the right thing to do tommorow. It's the right thing to do next week.
But it is not free, and the costs grow exponentially with each iteration. Eventually, "exponentially" will beat anyone... even Microsoft.
They've actually trapped themselves extra badly because each successful iteration ingrained the expectation from their customers that much more that the next iteration too would be backwards compatible. The hole just gets deeper every time.
I've had this discussion with other developers before, who insisted the users need backwards compatibility. My counterargument was just this, a day will come, sooner than you think, where you won't be able to provide it. Personally, I think we need to level with the users sooner, rather then later: We can't provide it indefinately, so let's at least hold the option open of breaking compatibility. (I'm not saying to break it for no reason, just that you will have to, the logic of modern programming demands it, so be ready.)
As usual, if you sensibly prepare for it in advance it's easier than if you are suddenly shocked by it.
Increased Irrelevancy, however. (Score:4, Insightful)
MS may have a long way to fall, but they will become increasingly irrelevant like IBM has.
As far as I am concerned, they don't need to go out of business to have fallen. They just need to lose most of the influence and power they have gained through their illegal and unethical business practices.
Re:Increased Irrelevancy, however. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.white-mountain.org/jamie/)
Have a chat with Sun, BEA, HP, SCO, Oracle, Linus, or any bank about how "irrelevant" IBM is. I think you're in for an eye-opener.
This was not an unusual case (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This was not an unusual case (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This was not an unusual case (Score:4, Insightful)
...in a beta version of the operating system. It never showed that message in a released version of the OS. While it might have been FUD, it was also true - Windows wasn't supported on DR DOS and Microsoft couldn't guarantee that it would run correctly. (Yeah, yeah, I know that the code was still **in** the released version, not active)
Re:This was not an unusual case (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.factcheck.org/)
Here is a link concerning the situation in case any readers are not familiar: Caldera: MS Cheated in DOS War [wired.com]
Security implications of kludged patches? (Score:5, Interesting)
That bit of the article really got me. How many memory allocators do they need to debug or secure? How many exploits might be found by pretending to be SimCity or other applications and getting branched off to languid backwaters of code that don't get much ttention anymore?
Xix.
Kids (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't agree (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, there isn't such a big incentive *right now* to write code for Avalon / XAML.
Yes, MSDN Magazine has the *wrong* attidue (notice the ratio of artciles about yet-unavailable technologies to availiable technologies in it recently?)
As a matter of fact, personally, I didn't bother with them because I've more pressing concerns at the moments.
But, the thing is:
By all accounts - Longhorn *will* keep the reknown MS' backward compatability.
A> There hbeen nothing on the contrary.
B> MS has a *really* good track record.
The so-called breaking changes (he mentions
The change in VB.NET is indeed a breaking change.
But, it's not the first time that VB update break existing code (as a matter of fact, I think that is normal for VB, although the changes are usually minimal)
VB.Net is a new language, VB6 has reached its end, you might want to compare it to the transition from C to C++, you've to break compatability (for the furious: byte *buffer = malloc(1024); isn't legal c++)
And if you're going to break compatability, why not do it in a way that is still largely the same, but gives you *so much more* freedom & flexibility.
The other choice would've been to exclude VB from
So, in short, Joel is talking about moving away from old technology (Win32) that he descibe as hard to use and error-prone to a better, OO, managed way of doing things.
While at the same time *retaining* backward compatability.
I don't get it.
Sure, a lot fo code is now not the newest & brightest, but you can say the same about COBOL.
About MS losing the desktop to Web app, that is bull.
Personally, I can't *stand* using webmail, the latency there is killing me.
Any sort of web app is usually a mess to write & maintain correctly - especially cross-platform(for example, Firefox 0.9 can't show *Slashdot* properly - I get all sorts of hovering errors when tables over-write one another. Strangely, IE show it perfectly well. And I usually use Firefox, for the reasons Joel mentioned).
Yes, MS made a big mistake with not updating IE, but I can see their point.
If they are going to sell Longhorn, it needs to be more than snappy UI & pretty pictures (especially for the business client).
It has to have *killer app* - IE 7 & WMP 10 are probably on top of the list at MS.
I'm certain that we will so much improved applications that require Longhorn (DirectX for Longhorn isn't that much of a long call - by the time that it would be out, 2000 would be an old system, and MS can justify not supporting it on Win2K. Games are the #1 killer app, after all.)
Re:I do agree, and not with you. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 12 2006, @07:54PM)
Sure, backwards compatibility with Win32. But not full backwards compatibility, it's more like a subsystem.
The point is, why re-code all your applications for the new longhorn stuff, why re-code all your applications for all the
It's an interesting time, and I won't bet on either side of the coin. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
ps. Mozilla and Firefox run Slashdot and 99.8% of web sites out there perfectly for me.
Re:I do agree, and not with you. (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday March 10 2004, @01:38AM)
OK, yeah, your shitty little form might be compatible for ever and ever and ever, but anything of any weight is going to break sooner or later because it will rely on Java, or something else,, and eventually that will break backwards compatibility.
Some fun examples of broken webapps - my company's internal time-tracking program won't run properly under Firefox, but runs fine under IE. It's a Java applet, and they both run the same Java VM, but Firefox never finishes loading it (at least, that's the apparent behavior - I have more important things to do, so I just use IE once a month when I need to take a vacation day).
Another fun broken webapp was my old University's online coursetools site, which for quite some time wouldn't load properly in Safari because of an ambiguity in how quotation marks were supposed to be handled.
Web apps will break sooner or later. Open source apps will break sooner or later.
Re:I do agree, and not with you. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with that, and I hate most web apps, but that doesn't matter. All that matters is what most users do, and most users don't mind web apps. Most of the "ordinary users" I know make frequent reference to "checking my webmail often".
Most of the comments above this one which don't simply say some variation of "I totally agree with Joel" are talking about how awful the old code is, and how much better the new stuff will be. I agree with this, and as a programmer and network engineer I am strongly drawn towards elegant solutions and new technology, but as a rational human being I have to admit the irrelevance of it all.
One of the most drastically apparent things for me is the difference between Win 98 and Win XP. Having studied both and used each one for more than two years, I can tell you that XP is at least an order of magnitude better than 98. But many of the users I speak to don't even know the difference! I ask which one they're running, and they don't know. I have to explain to them how to check.
Users don't care about whether your solution is elegant or advanced, all they care about is "can I get my webmail and use Word?" And if the developers want to move towards web apps because they're easier, then the users aren't gonna stop them. If Microsoft maintains backwards compatibility at the expense of good efficient code, users will thank them for it, not switch software vendors.
Joel Might Be Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://asimjalis.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 17 2002, @03:44AM)
Microsoft continues to support backward binary compatibility. My DOS applications still run on WinXP.
Also, Microsoft has always changed its APIs over time to keep up with the state of the art. This is why we have ATL, MFC, and tons of other libraries for the same underlying problems.
Conclusion: This is nothing new.
----
Notes on Stuff [blogspot.com]
Visual C++ now free (Score:5, Informative)
As a (former) die hard web developer (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see technologies like SOAP enabling rich clients to interop across platforms (ok MS haters, SOAP is a mult-vendor thing so don't reply telling me some tinfoil hat story on how MS will patent SOAP and sue anyone who uses it without license). I am willing to bet some other protocols similar to SOAP, or perhaps riding on top of SOAP, will come along to allow richer communication across networks. HTML just isn't going to do it.
While I totally agree that open standards and open source make the best APIs, MS failed way before even that line. Take SMB for example. Their systems, by design or mistake, don't even follow their own standard! I am betting it is a little of both. Their APIs are this way as well. What is really hurts MS in this particular area is poor documentation and poor implimentation of their own APIs. Having worked with
Re:As a (former) die hard web developer (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://br.geocities.com./lgcdutra/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 07 2004, @05:34AM)
On the spot, AC.
What I wished was that we went back to POSIX -- well, not quite, actually some garbage-collected functional stuff running on POSIX -- and the X Window System.
And I think that could come to pass. With GNU/Linux spreading, Mac OS X holding its share and getting X servers (both Apple's gratis and Fink's free ones), and Cygwin/X getting easier and easier to install, we could soon have X servers everywhere, so that we could run applications from POSIX servers whenever HTTP didn't suffice.
A trend may be starting with public Telecenters [sp.gov.br] and other LTSP or otherwise host-and-terminals GNU/Linux implementations.
Then we could go back to improving the host (GNU Hurd, functional programming, relational databases) and the terminals (Cairo, I/O) and stop worrying about the API du jour.
And people say.... (Score:5, Funny)
And people say the evil giant doesn't try to fix it's software. They fixed SimCity DAMN IT!
Re:SourceCode != QualityDocumentation (Score:5, Informative)
KDE's are at http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/cv
Thats every function call to program in KDE and Qt all completeley cross-refrenced, with examples.
Re:This is how Microsoft fixes bugs (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.openspeech.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 29 2004, @02:30PM)
Perhaps I need clarification of your point?
ideological loss, but still winning in the market (Score:3, Insightful)
Until then, MS can mess up all they want (or all you say they do), and still win in the market place. As long as everything runs Windows, everything else has to be compatible with a constantly moving target.
Moving the the target is also how MS keeps their deathgrip on the share percentages. It's part of their "competitive advantages" (read, "platform lockin").
I disagree .NET will fail due to Longhorn/Avalon (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.envirooments.com/)
I believe that the long wait for Longhorn/Avalon to be released will cause more people to pick up
Developers will see the benefits of the
When Longhorn/Avalon finally gets released, the adoption I expect will be slow. We just spent all this money becoming proficient with
I just can't see how
What about flash. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.andrewvc.com/)
We can only hope... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://blog.macb.net/ | Last Journal: Monday March 05 2007, @04:38PM)
"... they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. "
Win32 API will live forever (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.geocities.com/orion_blastar/contact/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 03 2007, @07:19PM)
Eventually the WINE development team will crack most of the undocumented Win32 API calls and make WINE better with each release. When that happens, Microsoft will have abandoned the Windows 32 bit platform for Longhorn. Then Linux + WINE will be very valuable for people with new machines who can only run Longhorn or Linux.
My only request is that WINE and other programs than run softare using the Win32 APIs, create a sandbox to prevent viruses and worms from spreading.
The bets are on as to how soon those Longhorn viruses and worms come out after Longhorn is released.
Re:Win32 API will live forever (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.evercrest.com/)
The problem is WINE is not "undocumented Win32 API calls". CrossOver Office can run MS Office just fine, and if there's any Windows application that would be using "undocumented Win32 API calls", it'd be Office. The fact is that there aren't any useful undocumented API functions. What's not documented is undocumented for a reason and is not used, even by Microsoft apps.
The problem with WINE is that the Win32 API is so mind-bogglingly huge because it covers just about everything you'd ever want to use an OS to do, that the WINE developers haven't been able to implement the whole thing. They go for the "most bang for the buck" APIs.
Gracious plug at the end.... (Score:4, Funny)
Well I have posted twice about this as I read, and now must say that I found the root of the article. It was all a damn ad!
Think he's living in the past a little on this one (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Mac. Perhaps a few years ago it was "hard to be a Mac user". But it's not hard at all anymore, except for games - and even then it's only troubling, because most game development has shifted to the console. For any other kind of App you can get just about any top-tier program for the Mac, with Mac versions of any remaining holdouts on the way. In fact I would absolutly say that I dislike Office on the PC but do not find Office for the Mac as annoying.
2) Web apps. Somewhat contrary to the "Everything will be lightweight web apps" message, I think we are seeing the real rise of web apps that make use of the web only as a transmission medium and have much richer interfaces. As an example I would point to iTunes which does not have an interface you can point a browser at, but is a real web app at heart. I think we'll see more programs along those lines.
Avalon seems like a neat idea but I don't know how useful it will really be to be able to create a form with a floating video in the background with a few lines of XML. To really make it work they'd have to deploy Avalon support to previous versions of IE back to Win98 really - and I'm not sure they are going to do that.
I do generally agree with Joel's assesment though, that the camp that just cares for new wizzy features and has abaondoned supporting old stuff has won out. Ironically Java has taken the "protect old code" attitude with things like Generics support, whil Microsoft has gone for a somewhat more featureful implementation that might break some older stuff. As he noted there are changes from
Key quotation regarding IE... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.
It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: "Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client." You'll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that "Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft's stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We're investing on the desktop, we think it's a good place to be, and we hope we're going to start a wave of excitement..."
The trouble is: it's too late.
So, when Slashdot goes on and on about how great Mozilla is (and it is good, I'm not saying it isn't - I really like FireFox 0.9) and laments how Microsoft hasn't done a damn thing with IE since 2001, and how you need the Google toolbar and this and that - remember that quote.
Microsoft wants to slow DOWN the rate of advancement in the browser. If you buy that, and buy Joel's premise on that, you now should conclude something VERY VERY IMPORTANT.
Mozilla for Windows may be the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT OSS project there is. In many ways, it is just as important as developments in Gnome and the linux kernel, disk systems, network protocols, what have you. It's advancements in being able to push rich applications is vital. It's replacement for Active Scripting needs to be secure. Every step it makes pushes another developer that may have gone to use the Windows API or
Garbage Collection (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
The main productivity boost in Python, for example, is its dynamic typing. Its simplicity second, and automatic memory management as a third, perhaps.
Also, his claim that you don't have to debug memory leaks with Garbage Collection is a common fallacy. Garbage Collection makes it very possible to leak memory, often in more difficult ways to debug, since the developer is typically unaware of what memory is behind held by which objects as usually there is no need to put much thought into the issue.
This is why WINE is the most important (Score:3, Insightful)
When the Windows API becomes a commodity implementation, the exact thing will happen to Windows which happened to commercial Unix vendors when Linux and BSD reached maturity. It no longer becomes important to run the original (possibly a little better) version, if the free version does well enough.
Linux doesn't emulate Unix in every little detail--just enough to make it easy to run applications developed for Unix. In doing so, it made the Unix APIs a defacto open standard. WINE will do the same thing for Windows, and that, more than anything else, will be Microsoft's downfall.
In ten years, Microsoft may be gone as a company; but when people run GUI applications with buttons and scrollbars, it will be using the Windows API.
Flash is where it's at. (Score:3, Informative)
(http://endquote.com/)
Web as a the savior (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://douglas.min.net/essay/)
Why the browser will NOT be the future of app dev (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.josephguhlin.com/blog/)
Just my 2c, but I am sick and tired of hearing "The app is broken" and telling them to run ad-aware and hearing "Ok, it's fixed now. Try not to let it happen again." argh!
Misunderstanding WinFS (Score:3, Informative)
(http://br.geocities.com./lgcdutra/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 07 2004, @05:34AM)
While on general lines I agree with the article, he clearly misunderstands WinFS -- the effect might still be the same, as either MS itself is misunderstanding WinFS, or at least selling it badly.
WinFS, or files on a SQL -- not relational [dbdebunk.com] -- database is not about organising for search, but about not having to organise, yet being able to.
With current hierarchical filesystems, we are forced to organise files hierarchically, and that's very often cumbersome. So search functions have to dig into each document and kinda Google it, building a full-text index, and that takes lots of resources and is difficult to do. Not even Apple does it good enough, at least it didn't in my then-Mac OS 9 366MHz iBook.
With an SQL database as the filesystem, even if SQL is so inferior to the relational potential, we get rid of the necessity but not of the possibility of hierarchies: we can still put some or all of our files in hierarchies, but now the specific nodes in the hierarchies where the file is are just some more attributes, so any file can be at several places at several hierarchies, or at none at all. Searching too becomes more efficient, but the real benefit is alternatives to organisation, and therefore the possibility of richer queries and easier remembering.
HTML's lack of features? No. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.firetiger.net/)
Anyone else see this list? I scoffed at most of it instantly. Sure, the author apoligizes for a few of them but very poorly and with no explanation.
The author says that some of these can be solved by JavaScipt. No; all of them can be easily solved with Javascript. And if you don't like Javascript, try using ActiveX, DHTML/CSS, Java, Flash, ColdFusion, or any of the other many options out there.
It is true that these solutions take a little more work, but everyone knows that. The author admitted that much.
My question is this: If the author doesn't even say this list is accurate, why did he even put it in the article?
If he must make a point about the web versus Microsoft, make it about the fact that Microsoft refuses to update their web browser even though everyone knows that it was not even standard compliant when it was last released so very long ago. There are much better browsers that are still under constant development including Opera, Panther, and Mozilla to name some excellent examples.
I respect Joel, but.. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @10:21PM)
1) It's not ANSI VB or ANSI Win32. If you settle on a programming environment controlled by one vendor, then they can change the language specifications at will. I wrote my System/UI specific wrapper functions over a decade ago. Why didn't Joel?
2) Joel compares C/C++ memory management to automatic vs manual transmissions. I would associate memory management in C/C++ to doctors who know once they make an incision, they have to close it back up when done. Either you know the procedure (or launguage) or you don't. The article seems to want to apologize for all the Comp Sci grads who don't have a clue when it concerns system level programming (I found one in my office this week).
3) VB is a layer on top of Win32. So is MFC. From the object dumps I've run on MSIL applications, so is
4) The Win32 API is feature rich. Give credit where it is due. The Win32 API evolved from the OS/2 API developed in the late 80's in conjuction with IBM.
5) The reason Raymond Chen had to make the effort to be backwards compatible was that some published API calls were always different than the implementation (say API bug). Remember the DOS bug/feature that allowed TSR's? Remember when DDE turned into netDDE which turned into COM? This brain-dead logic has carried MS through until modern day XP. As an API/Library developer for my companies products, I've had to tell third parties I made a bad design decision (2) and you need to re-compile with the new library/API header. All of them appreciate and understand my mistake. Why can't Microsoft do this?
Great article, just some food for thought from a old time beer drinking hippie programmer. Gotta go, playing network freecraft with my ten year old.
Enjoy,
hoist by their own petard (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I'm interpreting accurately, Microsoft just pulled off a successful vaporware strike
The rest of Joel's rant is just way off track. Microsoft has ALWAYS pushed a new incompatible tech, while keeping old ones around. I mean hey even after I got COM, OLE2, COM+,
People predicted MS was going to put itself out of business when it came out with NT, because well hey while you're learning a new API, you might just switch to Solaris (now on x86!) or that exciting OS/2 thing... Microsoft succeeded for two reasons: it kept trying ("third time is the charm" really applies to MS) and its competitors kept screwing up. I don't actually see that changing significantly.
MS is hardly doomed
Reason #78,048,234 to dump Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday November 05 2003, @03:12AM)
Great. All our worst fears have been confirmed. The latest version of windows is exactly the hacked-up piece of shit operating system that it acts like that we've all secretly hoped wasn't really the case....
Who in their right mind would want to develop for a platform like this? Now we know why the OS is so bloated and slow. There's probably a zillion special little mods to the OS to make select, Microsoft-approved legacy apps run properly.
Productivity boost by managed memory is overblown (Score:3, Informative)
I have experience writing for both platforms, and I prefer C++, despite VB's garbage collection. VB certainly makes it easier to do some things, but that's mainly because it offers an abstraction for all the Win32/COM red tape (dig through the MSDN to find which of the eleven or so Close...(), Delete...(), Free...() functions you need for this thing, and Release() all those COM pointers in every conceivable exit point).
C++ itself provides the means to relieve the programmer of much of this menial work, though. Microsoft doesn't take advantage of C++'s capabilities, but that's probably because C++ hadn't evolved enough when much of the Win32 code base was written.
In my recent work, which has all been C++ on Win32, I almost never have to manually delete anything. The Boost Smart Pointer Library [boost.org] has been tremendously useful, both for internal program logic and for taming the Win32 memory management nightmare. The reference-counting boost::shared_ptr template class and its relatives can be used to automatically free memory allocated with new when the last pointer is destroyed. What's more, you can specify a templatized deleter, so that a shared_ptr can manage COM objects, GDI objects, file handles, memory allocated in any of the dozen or so Windows APIs (GlobalAlloc(), VirtualAlloc(), HeapAlloc(), ThrashDiskAndThenCrashAlloc(), etc.)
It's possible to augment the API in such a way as to boost productivity without breaking backward compatibility. The .NET framework is a huge misstep, in my opinion, because it needlessly throws away a decade's worth of existing code. We were going to use it in a recent product, but we decided to go with MFC instead, because it couldn't link with our existing C++ code (well, it could, but huge marshalling bugs [codeproject.com] that have gone unfixed for years made it completely unusable).
ASP.NET is brilliant? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.suberic.net/~marc/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 22 2003, @12:39PM)
It was going just fine until...; (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullcrap! I bought heavily into MS's bull about being able to develop with Word and Excel macros in the Visual Basic scripting language. I wrote several applications for customers that had lotsa finely crafted Word and Excel macros. I bought the first round of Microsoft documents that told me how to do these things. I never bought the second round.
You know why? Because they changed everything in the shift from Office 6.0 to Office 97! All of a sudden, every API in the Visual Basic scripting language that underlaid Office changed; not just a little, but enough that a whole new shelf of documentation was needed. When I presented my clients with estimates of what was needed to rewrite the macros to make them work under the new Office they quietly asked that I restore Office to the old version. No can do! Microsoft had made that impossible!
Failing that, my clients insisted that it was my duty to make the macros work with the new version of Office no charge. This would have required rewriting them. Riiiiight! I was gonna do that! In the end, they went back to doing it by hand and I never got another job from them!
Developers! Developers! Developers! indeed! How many more times do you think I did anything with Microsoft tools?
Good/Bad competition (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://brandonbloom.name/)
ATI and nVidia are in what I like to call "good competition". I can choose one or the other with minimal negative side effects for either choice. Their products are complete substitutes for each other and that is good. They force each other to be innovative.
The current (and for the forseeable future) situtation with operating systems isn't so wonderful. Mac, Windows, Linux, and Unix are certainly in "bad competition". I can't switch between them that easily. If I choose the wrong one I've got major problems. Can't run this game on Linux, can't get that application for Mac, constantly fighting spyware on Windows, etc. Their products fill different, but similar needs. Maybe it is just the nature of the product, but it really sucks. Sure the normal rules of competition apply, you need to have better stuff than the compedators. Unfortunatly, operating system vendors can easily lock you into their product. Changing my video card may cause an visual artifact in 1 out of 20 games, but changing my operating system is gonna throw a wrench in everything.
Platform independant applications exist, but we aren't quite there yet. I think more effort needs to be put into this. Personally, I really like the
I think Microsoft sees that they will not be able to hold onto the operating system market forever and I believe they are making a good move (both for themselves and for the industry) by depreciating native Win32 in Longhorn. Hopefully, the bet-the-company mentality will let them force people to accept change.
I don't think HTML is the future (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/dfj225 | Last Journal: Monday March 01 2004, @04:15PM)
Until then I will continue to see this dilema: what advantage does using a "web app" version of my software give me? Certainly, I can't imagine using some of my favorite sofware (Photoshop, iTunes, VS) as web apps. I think that as things work now, it would be possible to make web apps like Word, Excel, and definetly Outlook possible, but why? and what do I gain? When I type in Word, I don't want to wait 30 seconds for spell check to complete. When its late at night and I am writing a paper and it just so happens that the latest and greatest virus hits and my connection keeps bottoming out because of all the traffic, I don't want my word processing software to stop working. To me, using the common "desktop" software in a web interface would just be more of a pain. And I can't imagine what something like Photoshop would be like if developed using this type of technology. I think that software like Photoshop will always have to be developed as rich client or "desktop" software. The only other feasable solution that I see, is if one was to use some sort of Adobe portal where you log in, the latest version of their software is stored locally on your computer, and is run in some time of intrepreter much in the same way that Java or JavaScript works now.
Of course this is what I think when looking at technology as it stands now. I do think that in the future someone may create a new protocol for the internet that allows for a truely "web app" driven lifestyle, where you boot your computer, Mozilla (or whatever browser is popular by then) loads displaying something that could look like a standard desktop, execpt all of the icons really link to web apps that stream off of a server and are never actually installed locally. This could be a feasable future, but it is definetly not going to happen with HTTP and HTML, at least I hope not!
Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)
Technical community and pundits: OMIGOD the windows API is so crappy and kludgy and windows crashes a bazillon times a day and you shot my dog
Microsoft: no, it's actually YOUR badly written applications
TCP: OMIGOD it's still your fault
MS: That's ok we fixed it for you anwyay.
TCP: OMIGOD why did you waste all that energy on such and old and rotten API! You suck! HUZZAH! I'm throwing salt in your eyes
MS: Yeah, I know, we finally decided it was time to part with all that baggage and hired smart guys that you seemed to like and invented
TCP: OMIGOD why did you do this to me!? I thought you loved me!? I'm going to run off with my new lover "teh intarweb" where we will make complicated scientific visualization applications out of javascript and feed starving mouths with semantic web markup alone, and live in a utopian libertarian dream!
I don't buy it. I think Joel has entered the crank-o-sphere. While XUL shows some tentative promise as an application development platform, current web standards are pretty damn CRAPPY at creating rich interactive GUIs or applications of any complexity. That is why we see so much Flash cropping up.
I for one think
J2EE, portlets, .NET etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://deternal.dk/)
A good example is lotus workplace, based on J2EE - you can access, edit, create information. When you need more advanced features you get a 'richer' java interface.
Of course this is not always enough, and then you can use their rich client for the available platforms - most users will however not need this.
Also the latency problem is not very big, since the lotus products work via replication (and thus you are working on a local copy while the server version is locked etc.).
There's a lot of stuff you can do via the web which is normally done via desktop app's. Using Java makes it crossplatform (and thus makes the OS decision irrelevant). This is not to say that desktop app's will disappear, but more to say that the author is right - a lot of stuff will work perfectly fine via the web.
Microsoft needs change, otherwise it will die. (Score:3, Insightful)
Having worked extensively with Windows, I can safely say that WIN32 sucks...not from a quantity side (you can do everything with it), but from quality side: everything is a horrible mess and the simplest thing to do becomes a really hard task with WIN32. Therefore, I considered it natural to slowly be phased out, either driven out by market forces (that can't stand the cost of developing for bare Win32) or real innovation.
Software and hardware companies should also understand that there is an upper limit to the computer market. This limit is defined by how much needs are covered. This limit has been reached in the last few years: modern operating systems and applications cover almost every need. There is just no need for newer operating systems, for Office enhancements etc. People are at last satisfied with what they have, and there is no need to change.
I really doubt Microsoft will change anything with Avalon. No matter how impressive the new interface is, I really doubt hundrends of small, intermediate and big companies will ruch to change hardware in order to run Avalon. It's not like 10 years ago, when networking and windowing were considered new and cool technology by average Joe. Now everybody can have a decent GUI, either with Linux or an older version of Windows (Windows 2000, for example).
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Informative)
Say what you like about MS's evil ethics but *do not* mock their API docs [microsoft.com]. They're very good.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://ameoba.0pi.com/)
Bizzare, yes. Undocumented, no. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://autopr0n.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 06 2005, @01:30AM)
but I've always been able to find documentation on every part of it. Microsoft documentation is very good, and has always been.
I'm sure there are a lot of bizzare hacks and special modes that are not documented, but if you base your code off the documented APIs, you'll be fine.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:4, Insightful)
Wasn't the lack of documentation for some APIs part of the U.S. antitrust trial?
IIRC, there were some APIs that weren't even documented INTERNAL TO MICROSOFT. Something about not having to document APIs for third party developers if the API wasn't documented for Microsoft use...
Re:Why it has to die (Score:4, Informative)
+ finding documentation on ASP vs finding documentation on PHP
In the index, you click "Web Development", "Server Technologies", "Active Server Pages". If that's too hard, you type 'ASP' in the search box in the top left hand corner. OK, the ASP language reference is under the IIS docs but you'll find a link to it from the easy-to-find ASP pages above.
+ finding documentation on VB.NET vs finding documentation on python
OK, I couldn't see this one in the index myself. But I searched for 'VB.NET' in the box on the left and the sixth or seventh link goes to the VB and VC# language docs, complete with reference, which is in the Visual Studio documentation section.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Insightful)
You're claiming that MSDN is impossible to read? I've been a programmer working in Windows development for years, using Win32 APIs, MFC, and various other bits and pieces. Say what you like about the interfaces themselves, Microsoft's documentation is, and always has been, comprehensive and remarkably well organised for something on that scale. Compared to typical *nix man pages or trying to sort out perldoc, it's paradise, and why the top-level poster thought giving the source code was at all equivalent to giving good documentation I have no idea.
Pales in comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday March 24 2003, @08:30AM)
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Insightful)
doesn't compare to much to "We'll give you the source code"
Microsoft Developer Network [microsoft.com] has comprehensive documentation about the Microsoft APIs. When I was developing for Windows platform, I never needed any documentation other than MSDN. And if you want source code, you can download the SDKs for free. Though it contains only sample codes, I wonder how many Linux developers looked at the sources of the APIs they use. I have never did such a thing.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why it has to die (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.dasmegabyte.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday June 22 2004, @11:41PM)
Sun's pretty good, too...before
(use three slashes instead of two and you enter XML documentation mode which is slightly more intuitive than javadocs). I can add a new method to our data layer and not have to announce what it does to the rest of the team...which saves some email time.
Oh, and I like Apple's development docs, because they're always in nice detailed PDF files full of errata, examples, war stories, and explanations of Why It Is Like This.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://brianm.org/)
Once you get used to building projects where you can view data paths from end to end with no opaque blocks in the middle, and once you get used to being able to compile debug code into any and every library, you'll never want to go back.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Informative)
(http://docwhat.gerf.org/)
I don't think he was saying you want to debug other people's stuff. If you have a full debugging version of all the libraries (your and other peoples) it is *much much* easier to debug problems.
And even though I may not want to debug other people's libraries and such, I have had to. This is how I have found bugs in things like PHP, mod_python and such. They were corner cases to those developers, but they weren't for my applications. I'm thankful I could track those problems down, because my application got back up and running again. Not usually the case when I have proprietary closed libraries.
Ciao!
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
*wipes away a tear*
Thanks... I needed that. If I had modpoints, you'd have +1 Funny right now.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Insightful)
Comprehensive up to a point. In fact, not comprehensive at all. People have sold books [amazon.com], profitting from Microsoft's incomplete documentation. I think the grandparent post is somewhat exagerated in saying that it was Linux that made Microsoft put aside the API. However, in my particular case, it was the incomplete API documentation that made me stop using NT and start programming in Qt in Linux. I tried and tried, and there was no way I could make a data acquisition program I was writing to work well under NT 4. I did exactly what the MSDN documentation said. Then, in desperation, I tried to learn Qt. 20 minutes after starting to read the Qt documentation I had my first non-trivial working Qt program. That was in 1998, and I never wrote a MS-Windows program ever since. I have migrated with little effort my MFC programs to Qt/KDE. I only need three sources of documentation: qt3-assistant, Johnson & Troan's "Linux Application Development", and Rubini's "Linux Device Drivers". Plus the thousands of sites in the web where I can find source code for Linux, of course. A complete documentation is good, but nothing can replace a good set of examples.
Hey now (Score:4, Informative)
(http://autopr0n.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 06 2005, @01:30AM)
It sounds like this guy is a kid playing around, or at least he was when he wrote the program.
Anyway, yield is actually only needed on OSs that do not have preemptive multithreading, which NT does. Yield wouldn't have solved his base problem anyway, just that he could have seen it didn't work when he set the thread to real-time, rather then seeing his machine lock up. (When you set a thread to real time, it's like running it on an OS without preemption, sort of).
In java, the threading behavior is determined by the underlying OS. If it has preemption, your java code works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. Back in the 1.1 days, Macs didn't have preemption (didn't get it until OS X(!)), and since java might want to run there, they you needed to yield.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.crfh.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 14 2006, @02:47PM)
Oldschool (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://autopr0n.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 06 2005, @01:30AM)
Re:Why it has to die (Score:4, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Actually Classic and Carbon are pretty much one and the same. Carbon is Classic with some of the less-used and less-functional API removed, plus some of the newer Mac OS X-related stuff added in.
Classic has a TON of documentation, the print form of it was mostly the Inside Macintosh [amazon.com] series, which had literally dozens of books. The books were separated logically by category (interapplication communication, graphics, human interface, etc) and had extremely detailed documentation on the Classic API as well as tons of examples. Most of that information is still good to use for Carbon, in fact most Classic programs will recompile easily using the Carbon API - just a few minor changes have to be made.
As for ease of use, Carbon and Classic seemed pretty intuitive to me. Certainly no harder to use than the Win32 API and, IMHO, probably easier.
Now the new entry into all of this is Cocoa. Cocoa is the new API that Apple is using for Mac OS X. Cocoa is based on Objective C, a Smalltalk-like language which adds object-oriented ideas to the C language. It does this in a fairly simple manner and doesn't feel as kludgey as the additions which C++ added to C. You can also use both C and C++ code within your Carbon code without too many hang-ups.
The Cocoa API has the poorest documentation of all of these API but it is definitely the most simple to use. It has a form of garbage collection, it has some very nice helper classes, and the method names (they are called messages in Objective C) and class names are very descriptive and intuitive. Of all the API I've discussed Cocoa might be the most difficult API to get information about but once you learn the basics you can really fly in coding with it.
Re:Prophecy (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://inglorion.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 06 2005, @07:17AM)
Seriously, an open standard will keep them _alive_, but it won't keep them _ahead_. They have to innovate and stay incompatible, so that people won't want to use competing products.
Re:Prophecy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were using something other than HTML and HTTP, you wouldn't be doing Web development; you'd be doing some other kind of development.
Macromedia Flash applications backed by SOAP look very interesting for apps requiring more GUI-like, real-time interaction. This is basically what Java applets were intended for.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://plan99.net/~mike/)
OK, no offence but it's pretty clear that you've not done a huge amount of programming, at least, not with APIs of any size.
No API of any complexity at all is a "black box" - they are often backed by millions of lines of code, and that code, just like application code, will contain bugs and odd behaviours. The documentation will be incomplete - very few people can spec out a complex API to the degree needed to truly understand it, even when you have documentation coming out of your ears like with MSDN.
Even assuming the API is perfection itself, it'll always be lacking SOME feature you want. Openness of an API is a very important thing indeed.
GNU\Linux (Score:5, Funny)
What's with the backslash in GNU\Linux? You look suspicious to me, Microsoft boy.
Re:Marc was wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I love this argument about state tracking. Every single server side scripting language posesses some kind of session tracking functionality. Based on IP address as well as some other odds and ends (depending on implementation). No cookies, no mess, and totally invisible to the user.
Saying thats not a valid form of state tracking would be like me telling you that because your unix terminal doesn't lock itself as soon as your keys leave the keyboard, its just a security risk waiting to happen.
Re:Why it has to die (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of my work these days is under Windows, and I will freely admit that on occasion I have used the source that Microsoft provides. That's right, I have the source to MFC, C library, ATL, WTL, etc. It's not due to lack of documentation though. I often debug in to assembly code, but it's normally to get to somewhere else (e.g. step in to the COM libraries to reach my COM code) and the debug symbols that are freely available normally suffice to give me enough context
Rose Glasses (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://nojailforpot.com/)
This is an Open Source fantasy. It simply isn't true no matter how much you love Linux (and I love Linux a lot). The API is not dead, it only seems that way to the Slashdot crowd who see thing through glasses with a unique prescription. Believe it or not, as of yet, Linux is not sweeping the world like a storm...
"It's open and documented such that developers feel comfortable using it and feel like they're getting a powerful suite."
This is only true for Open Source masochists. Building software that does not require the user to have intimate relationships with the OS to install, this is still a large issue that is more or less ignored by all the elitist "gurus" out there.
"One thing that Microsoft hope doesn't happen is Mono becoming the defacto standard and not the MS framework."
Honestly. This is not a troll. Is *anyone* actually taking this seriously? Mono is more or less a "If Microsoft can do it, OSS can do it better" type of deal. Mono is a tool in search of a problem. Write once, run anywhere is a fantasy that just does not provide any real world solutions to real world problems. The only reason so many people are using .NET is because Microsoft has made it the default environment, not because they have problems that only .NET can solve.
Re:Rose Glasses (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh? HTML is a fantasy? J2EE servers are a fantasy? How about reusable C++ code? I would say every time a cross-platform technology reaches maturity, people jump on it like crazy. I am not sure what's the current maturity of
It's about the APPs silly. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Joel's point - and the reason Microsoft killed netscape, is that as more and more applications (especially business database apps - which constitute most of the lock-in special apps I was talking about earlier) more to being web-based, it becomes less and less necessary to run Windows.
Microsofts's strategy with Internet Explorer, in the end, turns out to have been brilliant (maybe more brilliant than they originally intended). . . Make IE *good enough* to work for most 'current generation' websites, push it out for free to everyone in order to marginalize the competition to the point where no further innovation can happen in web-browsers without Microsoft also adding that functionality to IE, then STOP DEVELOPING IE so that NO innovation happens AT ALL.
Then, once people get frustrated with the limitations of html (which could have been alleviated with on-going development of the standards), announce that you are release a new technology that will give 'rich client' interfaces over the network.
Slam M$ + Praise Linux = Karma Whore (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been working on business apps for years now and I agree completely with the author. We deliver HTML based interfaces because it is so much easier to ensure the client runs on different hardware platforms. Desktop APIs come and go, but HTML is still going strong. The slickest rich client UI in the world is no good if it won't run.
Re:Prophecy (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft will back a huge open standard? This is the silliest thing I've read in a long time, you're either shilling or smoking something strange ..
Re:Why it has to die (Score:3, Insightful)
doesn't compare to much to "We'll give you the source code"
I disagree. Source code does not equal documentation, and if you have to trawl through source code to find the API, that's wasteful and time consuming (and just plain difficult). What source code does give though is the opportunity to trace down problems where the API isn't working as documented (or intended). That's a plus - but it's not necessarily a big plus.
Embrace and extend! (Score:3, Interesting)
Just as they tried to do with Java, Javascript, and to some degree HTML, Microsoft will do the same with the Internet at large. With the installed base they have, they rule. Write your Web applications to conform to standards; but if they don't conform to Internet Explorer's quirks, you're in trouble. The average user will think something is wrong with you.
Look at some of the Web sites or Web applications out there that are developed with Microsoft's tools. What I mean is, look at them with a browser other than IE, or a platform other than Windows. I think we've all seen where the substandard, Microsoft-Kool-Aid-drinking developer has thoughtlessly developed with Microsoft's tools, leaving the application broken for non-Windows/non-IE platforms. Hell, I'm sure such developers don't even test them on anything else but Windows-IE. In there minds, Windows and Internet Explorer is "everybody."
Microsoft absolutely counts on this behavior and how it makes anything but the Windows-IE combination look bad. They'll be sure to give the world more of the same with any "solutions" they concoct in the the future.
Microsoft's next generation of development tools and languages may run on the 'Net, and profess to work with any browser or platform; the practical truth of the matter will be different, however. The will again corral a herd of substandard developers within their API's and development tools, and send them stampeding over the World Wide Web to trample all other platforms and browswers.