Slashdot Mirror
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."
I've programmed for Win32, MacOS Classic, and MacOS Carbon. Of those APIs, Win32 was the easiest to use and had the best documentation. Carbon came in second, with Classic a very distant third.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Poppycock! When I write code under Linux, I go to man and Google first, not the source. In my experience, the MSDN library is more than a match - it's very good documentation. The problem is the sheer number of APIs under Windows..
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
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.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The win32 api, especially from a modern standpoint is just a bizarre creation. Certainly a lot more complex then the stdio, and other Unix libraries. It's grown in strange ways, by using the 'reserved' bits for new things, cramming weird structures in other structures.
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The first big win was making Visual Basic.NET not backwards-compatible with VB 6.0. This was literally the first time in living memory that when you bought an upgrade to a Microsoft product, your old data (i.e. the code you had written in VB6) could not be imported perfectly and silently. It was the first time a Microsoft upgrade did not respect the work that users did using the previous version of a product.
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?