I want Microsoft to do better, want Windows to be a decent development platform-and yet, I constantly see Microsoft playing the open source game: advertising how open-source and developer friendly they are – only to crush developers under the heel of the corporate behemoth’s boot.
The people who work at Microsoft are amazing, kind, talented individuals. This is aimed at the company’s leadership, who I feel has on many occasions crushed myself and other developers under. It’s a plea for help.
It’s never a good sign if people developing for your platform are not developing on that platform.
Developers are by definition highly computer literate individuals, so it won’t make much difference what OS providers do short of closing everything. Even then developers will always freely choose the OS tools they us unless they are forced into a specific direction. In this regard, I might choose a BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Windows or even something more obscure.
How I do what I do doesn’t mean that much relative to the result, the outcome means more than the method!
FWIW, I see much the same on the hardware side, there are no standard solutions, there are many ways to resolve a problem and a lot of debate about what is the right way versus the wrong way.
Before someone goes down that rabbit hole, what I state is not the same as arguing about good or bad solutions.
I have met coders that were not entirely computer literate… but most of the ones I work with now are. I’ve always said there are software guys and hardware guys and some few know both really well. Some just get into programming as a job and learn just enough to get by, rather than learn a bunch they don’t need to know to get through life.
I think what you were looking for is this.
“hahahaha. Oh, wait. You’re serious. Let me laugh even harder. HAHAHAHAHAHA”.
@GPP
I mean maybe 25 years ago this was true, at least in the majority of situations. These days computer literate people in and job are like magic!
Or maybe people used to be more honest and knew terhir limitations adn told the truth and now whaen asked something they say they have 3000 years experience in it where as back in the day I have said, I have never programmed in that before but give me a couple of days and I’ll see what I can do.
Of course people these days cannot cope with change and only know how to do things one way ()wonders if the fact I never bothered learning anything new in excel after 97 slightly counts that way. The keyboard shirtcuts all still seem to work! (It does not know there are other ways to do things (and why excel as a ponderance platform? becuase I have to deal with theses sorts of people every day!))).
What the author avoids is that the ability to open source certain components isn’t always Possible for Microsoft (or other company). Especially when a system is developed as closed source initially, it may have other dependencies with licences that mean they aren’t allowed to open source those parts. If a component is bound by a single line of licensed code, it’s not allowed to release it. It’s the equivalent of saying Mint Linux isn’t Really open source because it contains a graphics driver.
But Microsoft has a horde of cash. Its not a “we can’t do that” but a “we don’t want to pay for that”
I love the difference in perspective between software-people and pleople from other professions (like me) 😀
He says:
“The people who work at Microsoft are amazing, kind, talented individuals. ”
I say:
“Are they fucking retards?
Did they ever test this shit?
Do they even care about their software?
Did anyone there ever try to use it?
Is there one sane person left at that shithole?”
smashIt,
Even talented individuals the author talks about can face a lot of bureaucracy and politics in the real world.
I’ve always hated working for companies/departments whose QA standards were well below mine. Granted they’re usually looking at the bottom line, but I grimace at some of these projects I’ve had to ship in such a sad state. I’m good at finding bugs and vulnerabilities but you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t appreciate it unless they are being actively exploited. An awful lot of them don’t want to hear it and they don’t want to pay to fix things that aren’t a business priority.
It reminds me of an instance when MS had a buggy update in windows 10 that would delete files & settings from user profiles a few years ago, we were actually testing early releases and reported this bug to MS. Their support staff even escalated it to a development team, but someone concluded it was an intentional feature and they would not fix it. But oh boy when it got published to the world via windows update channels that’s when shit hit the fan. Once the media got involved then it became a serious priority, but not before.
@Alfman
Yep, I know this well, and this is really a key point of difference. You are talking about being an engineer or engineering a solution, when what most companies want are designer hackers who get a trinket to market quickly a generate some revenue without regard to future costs!
The big elephant in the room in my opinion is Microsoft owns GitHub. And this likely can’t end good. As for Microsoft technologies, toolchains and programing languages such as the C#. One needs to understand Microsoft is still a proprietary company in it’s DNK. That is how they do business. It’s not anything like what you get with for example C, C++, GCC, Python, GNU/Linux … It’s rather naive to expect that from Microsoft. At best you get VS Code and beyond that don’t expect all that much. They don’t have any flagship product that could be considered FOSS and for them to have a viable stream of revenue from it.
That’s the way I build self-installer .exe in the past as well, don’t use Microsoft tooling, etc. but use a Linux server instead.
Read the complaints about symlinks and file name length limits; came to the conclusion this was a Linux developer that didn’t want to learn a slightly different way of doing things. If symlinks are now a security risk, time to adapt instead of complain.