This will be my first in series of posts on one subject. Yes, that's correct. I will attempt to maintain some focus and stay on one topic instead of posting about whatever happens to be going on in my brain at the moment.
I have entered into the world of 1995 with the Win32 api and visual c++ for no reason other than to waste my extremely valuable time. This has been the site of my realization-that-everyone-else-realized-about-fifteen-years-ago. It dawned on me that despite the quirks and the crap throughout Windows, programming in it takes a lot of the guesswork out of things. For instance, if I were to make an application for Linux, there are many differences among the different distributions (filesystem layout comes to mind first) that I would have to account for manually within my application. Another example: say I want to capture the video from a webcam in my application. With Windows there is one function I can call, check for error, and go from there. With Linux, I have to make sure that libraries to handle low-level access to the webcam are installed properly and I have to know where they are for many distributions. Most likely I want to just support one api so I have to make sure it is installed. If I am writing an application with a wide variety of customers, it is easy to see why Windows is the easy choice here (ignoring the fact that it is already installed on 99% of personal computers to begin with). I guess I've seen the value of the Microsoft "platform," despite its many faults (and steep monetary cost).
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1 comment:
Sad but it does have a great deal of truth to it.
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