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Windows Loses Ground With Developers
An anonymous reader notes that InfoWorld is covering a survey of North American developers that claims that Linux is gaining share as the number of developers targeting Windows fell 11 percent over the last year. Evans Data has been conducting these surveys of client, server, and Web developers since 1998. Evans Data says that the arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. The big gainer wasn't developing for a Web platform, but rather for Linux and "nontraditional client devices." Windows is still dominant, with 65% of developers writing code for this platform. Linux stands at almost 12%, up from 8% a year earlier. The article says that Evans Data collected information on Mac and Unix development but did not include them in this year's report.
"what took an entire staff can now be done efficiently with just a few."
.NET and Java. Our team is growing, and we're still hungry for people with skills. Work is work is work -- it takes no less effort today to code a functional, reliable software system -- and maintain it in a mission critical environment -- than it did 10 or 20 years ago. The resulting output is simply richer.
Really? Where? Sign me up! Unless by a "few," you mean "a few US salaries," while you outsource the project to a hundred-strong team of offshore developers?
I work in an environment with both a legacy mainframe and more current x86 applications -- both
I am, therefore you think.
QT costs A LOT of money (about $3000 per developer, AFAIR). _AND_ you can't legally use KDE's functions, because KDE is GPLed.
So, GTK is the only viable alternative (and guess what, most commercial Linux apps use GTK).
People write this sometimes and it baffles me. I use Visual Studio 2005 all the time, and it's a fine IDE, but it has some major issues and I don't find it any better than Eclipse, IDEA, or NetBeans for Java (all of which run on Windows, OS X, and Linux). I'm not saying Visual Studio is bad, it isn't, but it's hardly awesome like some people describe it. My assumption is that people who say that haven't really spent any time with those other IDEs.
When writing Java in IDEA 5 years ago, it had all the fancy editor stuff like re-factoring that Visual Studio just got. Later when I would switch over to c# from Java I always missed IDEA, Visual Studio was lagging in many ways.
For stuff like MFC work in c++, OS X has a very nice development environment with their X-Code.
Take a look at NetBeans 6 or Eclipse, I think you may be surprised. If you are doing web development, give up your IDE, which is just a crutch for such work, buy a Mac, buy TextMate, then learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Get your work done faster, smile more, and release your code on any platform you like; just my humble opinion, of course.
Additionally, it's not $3000 per developer, but $3000 for the first developer, for each dev thereafter, the price decreases sharply. Also, if you do your program right, you shouldn't need a lot of UI developers.
And, depending on what you are doing and how you are releasing it, you may still be able to use the Free version.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
I'm sorry, what? This isn't 1995 anymore where Motif and libXaw were the main GUI toolkits. gtk+, pygtk, gtk#, SWT, etc. are shipped in every distribution containing all the common widgets and are free to use. Maybe you mean your visual-studio developers can't use anything else? Well have fun in hell with that snowball waiting for MS to port the apps. you've locked yourself into.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
> How many people use 3 year old PC's
I'd have thought the average age of a PC is around 3 years. How many people use a new PC? Not everyone even gets a new PC - they get handed down one. Certainly that's the way it works in every company I've worked for. Developers/managers get the new ones, and they trickle down to the rest of the business. After 5 years the OS (lets face it, we're talking Windows here) stops being supported , so you'll have (right now) W2K boxes being replaced with XP (yeah, I've yet to hear of any company rolling out Vista).
> the more the price falls the more people will replace them.
The price of the PC isn't too important. Companies don't upgrade just because a replacement is cheap, and when a computer needs replacing it'll be replaced regardless of the cost. Most PCs belong to companies, not individuals. Individuals probably hang onto kit even longer than businesses do. It may surprise the average Slashdot reader but most people don't replace something unless it breaks.
11.8 - 8.8 = 3.0
.34
percentage of developers on Linux now - percentage of developers on Linux a year ago = percentage of developers who switched to Linux
3.0 / 8.8 =
percentage of developers who switched to Linux / percentage of developers on Linux a year ago = percentage of Linux developers who switched in the last year
So, the number of Linux developers increased by 34% in the last year.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
thats all well and good but when you want to use QStrings everywhere in your application (because they work well, support translation nicely and are compatible with your UI) all of a sudden everyone needs a license or you have to have some kind of compatibility layer so that your back end doesn't need QStrings.
Its doable, but its not trivial.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Nope. EACH developer who needs to compile sources which use QT should have a developer license (that's what our legal department said after talking with Trolltech). In practice, it's easier to buy license for every developer.
BTW, I was wrong with the price. It's $6600 per developer for three-platform desktop edition - http://trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/pricing
The way Microsoft ended Vb6 with no easy upgrade path to .net both irritated developers here and stranded some of them in vb6 with no path to .net.
What would you have wanted them to do differently? VB6 and prior was a terrible language. MS included a conversion utility in VS 2003 that does a credible job of converting decrepit VB6 code into VB.NET in case you want to retain the ugliness of the old program. I'm not sure what more they could have provided.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
No QT is free if your software is free.
It only costs if you charge for your software.
Frankly the price starts out at 6600 for Mac, Windows, and Linux for the first developer I think. Not all that expensive for a such a great tool.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
For example, you couldn't create something as simple as a statusbar item with QT, AFAIK.
/
I think this is what you want: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/desktop-systray.html
No, it really isn't. LGPL is the only general solution right now for a typical commercial application, and it presents problems with IP; specifically, section 4d, which boils down to providing code for the user to recompile that links to the LGPL'd libraries (not likely with most commercial IP models), or depending on the fact that the user has the library on their system already, which you can't do, because if they don't, your app, and therefore your whole commercial premise, is down the drain. A commercial application has to be install and run. Anything more than that and complications and problems ensue. Either way, because there is a license involved, legal has to sign off on it and that takes time, money, and can in some cases bring the entire process to a halt when legal won't sign off on something the license requires (such as source code distribution.)
Here is 4D for reference, emphasis mine:
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't know anything about your app, but you might be able to get a *NIX port almost for free. GNUstep runs on Windows too, but the Win32 back end is still a bit... interesting.
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Wow. Your wrong. Java can do most stuff on it's own and has a bajillion libraries for anything else, no cpan equivalent, but neither does .net. If you think .net libraries are excessive and javas are non existent then you've clearly never looked at the java documentation.
But then again, you don't sound like a professional developer. You obviously can't read documentation and can only program with an IDE holding your hand.
> it doesn't have a native look-and-feel on any platform, and it lacks integration with the OS.
Could SWT change - partially - your mind about Java GUI? It's as native as it can get. It powers apps like Eclipse.
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/
With a population of the same size, in order to get a margin of error of 20%, you'd need a sample size of 25. If the North American developer population is even a third of this, you'd get around 5% margin of error as well, so I'd say that statistically speaking that 400 is a pretty good sample size.
These calculations were taken from http://americanresearchgroup.com/moe.htmlAmerican Research Group's Margin of Error Calculator
Javadoc is your friend
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/
Netbeans has a free gui designer just like vs.net where it will autogenerate your java code.
Java is a very strict language and you need strong object oriented knowledge of inheritence to get anything done like write a hello world program.
http://saveie6.com/
Pricing development software for a global is inherently very hard, because as you point out the context varies so widely. We've priced Qt according to the value we believe it provides, but recognize our pricing won't work for everyone. FYI, if you are a small business or a startup, our Small Business Program will provides licenses at a comfortable discount (http://trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/pricing /licensing/smallbusiness).
Eivind Throndsen, Trolltech AS
Anyone who believes he learned anything worthwhile about computing by poking at Windows is severely misinformed ("memory management" ?? In *Windows* ?? huh ? hello ?)
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