Joel On Microsoft's API Mistakes

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."

Comments

And people say....

[jwcorder]

"The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

And people say the evil giant doesn't try to fix it's software. They fixed SimCity DAMN IT!

Re:This was not an unusual case

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, "It's not done till Lotus won't run!"

We can only hope...

[cmacb]

From the article:

"... they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. "

Gracious plug at the end....

[jwcorder]

"The company I started, Fog Creek Software, makes a terrific product called FogBUGZ for software project management and bug tracking. It's web based, affordable, and runs on your own server, and it's now available for Windows, Unix, or Mac OS X servers. Check it out now -- there's a free online trial!"

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!

GNU\Linux

[200_success]

I've developed software for both GNU\Linux platform as well as microsoft platform(s) and I'll take linux ANY DAY OF THE WEEK!

What's with the backslash in GNU\Linux? You look suspicious to me, Microsoft boy.

Re:Why it has to die

[Bluelive]

Debuging into system librarys ? Librarys should be blackboxes, and you should be able to trust them.

Re:Why it has to die

[fader]

Librarys should be blackboxes, and you should be able to trust them.

*wipes away a tear*

Thanks... I needed that. If I had modpoints, you'd have +1 Funny right now.

Let me get this straight...

[Hard_Code]

Ok, let me get this straight:

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 .NET and a whole bunch of other replacement APIs

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 .Net is a GREAT step forward (if not for everybody else, at least for people who previously lived lives subsisting off prior Microsoft C/C++/COM/ActiveX/etc. sludge).