On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Rogelio M. Serrano Jr. wrote:
>
> That is one advantage microsoft has over linux. Users never get to see
> the failures and problems of software development. They dont even see
> how it was made(and the horrible kludges very badly needed to meet
> deadlines). Even programmers who use microsoft tools never experience
> the difficulties and challenges micrsosoft developers go through like
> everyone else developing system and development software. Thats what
> users pay big bucks for. Thats why microsoft windows programmers do
> not got through as much difficulty developing programs because
> microsoft developers already did almost all of the programming for
> them.
>
This worries me. I suppose most of you people read that article on
salon.com about the dumbing-down of programming. Increasingly,
"programming", especially on Windows boxes, consists of stringing together
pieces of code written by other people, treating them as black boxes,
rather than the sort of programming where you actually make something
other than the equivalent of what we hardware guys call glue logic.
Arguably, this is gradually becoming more and more true under Linux as
well (OOP and component architectures encourage this trend), but at least
here most of the code that you have to string together is free software,
so you don't *have* to treat it as a black box. If there are bugs in
other peoples' code, you're not stuck trying find a way to work around
them. You can fix them yourself.
And arguably, developers on M$ systems *do* increasingly see the
difficulties and challenges the microserfs had to go through to make the
tools they're using. Most development work under Windows, other than
writing glue, consists of working around bugs left over from development.
--
Rafael R. Sevilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +63 (2) 4342217
ICSM-F Development Team, UP Diliman +63 (917) 4458925
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