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The Longhorn Dream Reborn
gbjbaanb writes "Early this month, Microsoft dropped something of a bombshell on Windows developers: the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET. Cue howls of outrage from .NET developers everywhere, but here Ars Technica describes what's more likely to have been going on and why Microsoft is finally getting its act together for developers."
I'm happy to report that read(2), write(2), and all the other syscalls that make up POSIX, and its derivatives, still work the same as they did decades ago.
Great, so it's dead too since it hasn't changed for decades? Same as with COM, there's nothing stopping you from using it and it still works the same as it did many years ago. You can still use all the old technologies and they still all work just the same as they used to.
Microsoft makes a lot of money from selling its development tools, documentation, etc... to its developer base. Microsoft simply runs the whole show. They are in full control, and call all the shots. And they understand perfectly well that if they keep the same technology platform in place, over time, they lose a good chunk of their revenue stream. That's why they have to obsolete their technology platforms, time and time again. They need revenue. It makes perfect sense. If you are a Microsoft Windows developer, one of your primary job functions is to generate revenue to Microsoft. Perhaps not from you, directly; maybe from your company. Whoever pays the bills for Visual Studio, MSDN, and all the other development tools. Maybe it's not you, personally, but it's going to be someone, that's for sure.
So your argument is that Microsoft intentionally periodically obsoletes languages in order to make money? Am I reading this correctly?
You do understand that:
I think your theory has some holes. Now, Microsoft has definitely obsoleted languages - Visual Basic for one (and good riddance) - but they did that because the language had shortcomings. I'd detail them but we have a nice article that already does that. The .NET framework and language stack, C# in particular, is on the same general level as Java: it is a language that more or less suits the needs of every platform developer. Why the hell would they want to obsolete that?
No, languages aren't the issue with MS development, nor are they the theme of the article; frameworks are. A perfectly good language can be horrendous to use if it is unable to properly interact with its host environment to accomplish what it needs to accomplish. In this case (once again FTFA) C++ could interact worlds better with Windows than .NET could, and so .NET use suffered. This was an implementation failure on Microsoft's part. The article stipulates that Windows 8 intends to bring .NET back on-par with C++ as a development language, which (if true) means that it will be stronger than ever.
It's also worth mentioning that in terms of accumulated skills and experience, learning a new language is trivial compared to truly learning a new framework. How you interact with the system and cause it to give you the resources and services that you want in the manner in which you want them is the heart of all modern systems programming, regardless of language. If Microsoft emphasizes .NET in their APIs, then .NET will be a viable Windows development platform; if not, then who knows? None of that reflects on the language itself, but rather on its appeal over other languages.
Now, eventually every language will be obsoleted ... probably? I suppose we haven't been through that many generations of languages to know for sure, but that seems to be the case so far. There are various reasons languages die ... they suck, better ones come out, nobody likes them, no frameworks support them, or their target developer group gives up on it. .NET's main backer is cu