Depends how you define 'career'. If you assume it is with one or a few companies then you'll almost certainly be disappointed. A 'portfolio career' is more relevant now, with greater mobility of ambitious employees between organizations. Don't let a company sucker you in to doing crap (eg. unpaid overtime if you are salaried) by dangling a 'career' carrot in front of you. It almost always is an illusion and when a company is struggling they'll ditch you quick if they have to.
For starters, one is a client side technology that doesn't even run in a JVM (its compiled down to javascript for christ sake) and one is a server side technology.
Again you have a limited grasp of the technology you are arguing about, since all you know is (a limited set of the).NET technologies. GWT is both client and server side. It is interactive and developing for it is a dream compared to crufty old page-oriented server side technologies.
This is utterly false and complete vitriol. I challenge you to dig up a single, verifiable reference that somehow makes.NET as a specification more tied to Windows than any other platform.
Who cares about the language specification? pretty much only language hobbyists and academics. As in any software technology it is the libraries that matter. Without the libraries a wonderful language and runtime don't do much..NET's libraries will always work better (or only, eg. WPF) on Windows. This is intentional by the vendor (it's why the invented the tech after all, if you were around then).
All the same with Mono, so what exactly is your point?
My point was *your* previous claim that Mono was better than Java for cross-platform work was bollox.
.NET is the superior spec from a technical standpoint. Java has a far bigger cross-platform ecosystem, but people are jumping ship and moving over to.NET in droves.
Again, the spec is less relevant than the libraries for practical use. If you are actually building real application software (cf. as opposed to working on Mono itself) you would know this. As far as implementation goes, why do you think the.NET licensing terms did not permit benchmarking? It's because in general the JVM is faster (I'm sure there are specific exceptions to this, but this is the general trend). The statistics also disagree with your second assertion about.NET growth. The trend is modest growth with a lot of fluctuation but not the 'droves' you claim. The droves are going to Objective-C and Android (Java-esque). Please see the following for the facts: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
In fact, both Java and.NET should lose further popularity as people move to Android and Objective-C as that is where all the market growth is. What you used to need a desktop or server for is slowly being marginalized for specialized stuff.
I really don't care if you prefer java, as long as I don't have to maintain your crappy software. But your preference doesn't make java superior.
You wouldn't maintain my software. I'd never hire someone who eschews objective facts for unreasoning fanboyism with above-normal arrogance to boot. Face it, Mono is neat tech that is hasn't got much traction and is not going anywhere fast - not because it is misunderstood, but because it is well understood. That's why Java still has around three times the ecosystem as C# (according to the approximate figures given by Tiobe). If people want.NET they get the real thing, and if they're for Open Source they use other technologies instead (C/C++/Java etc). Enjoy Mono and the paycheck you get with it.
When is the last time you used mono? Sounds to me like you're basing your arguments off of mono circa 2-3 years ago. Mono is one of the most actively developed products in FOSS and each release marks a significant improvement.
Improved, yes, for sure. Adequate at this time for my purposes (and those of many others), no. There are still too many things missing (although it sounds like your use is limited so you haven't noticed). Mono will also always be behind the MS technologies on each release of.NET. Please note that I've used both the real.NET and Mono and would use them more if they were actually better than Java in the strategic sense. They aren't yet, but maybe one day - so please understand I'm not an unreasoning fanboi in this regard.
Yes. In fact, you can compile.net assemblies using Microsoft's toolset and literally copy the resulting binaries over (in the case of ASP.NET, at least, I haven't done this with winforms). Microsoft's toolset compiles down to the same, standardized intermediary language that mono has no problem using.
Yes we already know. This is no different to Java. What you are saying is, "Mono works for me" although you seem to be only using ASP.NET (which is a clone of the old JSP technology, people have moved on to GWT these days). The fact is Mono doesn't yet work for other people. How about you try winforms in anger, or even better, try doing something with WPF? You can't since WPF is neither supported and won't be (according to Mono's own webpages). Try telling Windows.NET developers they can't use WPF since it is non-portable. Not going to work. This is not the only unsupported major library, and won't be the last (since Microsoft periodically changes its technologies). This makes Mono non-portable and less superior to Java IMHO (which is why the enterprise makes more use of Java than.NET, even if it is less publicly visible to small-time developers).
No, ironically, it can't do it easily. Java's implementations are far more fragmented (I'm looking at you, OS X) than Mono, *by far.*
Bollox. My Java applications (both JEE and GUI) work sweetly without porting effort. I have done this many times over the decade and a half I've been using Java (alongside.NET, C++, FORTRAN, Perl etc). In fact, away from my professional life, I routinely give people Java GUI apps that I have not tested on their specific flavor of desktop and not one of them has had a problem due to Java (any bugs in my code are something different). With.NET you do have to worry about what platform you developed on and are going too when you're doing complex things (and god help you if your app used pinvoke to get stuff done - as is often necessary). Also, you may have missed the news that Apple and Oracle are jointly going to develop the OS X JDK/JRE, which will ensure standardized implementations.
Most people who have actually used mono recently would argue that.NET's platform abstraction is far better than Java's. Getting any complex application, whether java or.net, running on a new platform isn't trivial, although your assertion that its wildy easier with java is absurd.
You are wrong again, and you are asserting that Java (designed for multi-platform) is less portable than.NET (derived from the JVM's design principles but deliberately made specific to Windows to suit the vendor's strategic interests). Laughable. I do a lot of work on OS X and it works seamlessly when I move it to Win XP & 7 32-bit and 64-bit and Ubuntu. In the past I'd move my stuff from Win 95 to Irix and it worked sweetly without recompiling or configuring the environment (that's how long I've been doing Java, so I have some clues).
Because *all* of the.NET libraries do not work seemlessly on all platforms. Getting Windows developers to use the open-source libraries is a non-starter. Have you ever tried to port a.NET application written using the Microsoft toolset to other platforms. Java can do it easily, the.NET and Mono combo falls far short of this.
> This is an extremely ignorant statement on your behalf.
You labeled me as extremely ignorant without even waiting to hear my reply. I suggest next time you hide your prejudice about other posters better. Perhaps you're ignorant if you've never tried to work with getting a complex.NET application working off Windows (without resorting to horrible platform-specific hacks).
Try writing a million-line application with fifty developers in Perl, Python or Ruby. Too hard. I know since I'm currently working on such a large project at the moment. Java and its tools are designed to scale in this way. Perl, Python, and Ruby are ok for smaller applications but simply can't scale development like Java. Hence, they are used in the Enterprise to solve smaller problems, but not this big ones.
.NET is not truly portable (and Mono is insufficient). Big outfits have more than only Windows..NET can have all the syntactic sugar in the world and it is still a non-starter since it is not portable. This makes.NET very inferior to Java except for smaller companies. This is why.NET adoption is still vastly lower than Java in the corporate space and this is unlikely to change due to this strategic limitation of.NET. So your argument that.NET is superior is made on an academic and not a practical basis.
It is good you like Objective-C. The rest of us find it weak, has a lack of a big ecosystem of tools, essentially limited to one platform, and crap for large multi-threaded applications. Don't be surprised that the rest of us are not as fond of Objective-C as you are.
You obviously write smaller apps only. Write a large app (such as my current work project) and C#'s cross-platform limitations become apparent very rapidly.
C# is a solution if you are such a small organization you have Windows only. The big outfits have a bit-of-everything and this is why Java is so strong in the Enterprise and C# is not really a contender (although people used to desktop computing only usually don't realize this which is why they suggest C#, and the incompatibilities of Mono makes it simply not good enough for big outfits - especially when Java is so good).
Man I tried really really hard to build a decent interactive UI in GWT (the best of the bunch) and it was still far short of what I wanted. So I built an applet (as unfashionable as they might be) with a JAX-WS back end to the server and everyone who uses it goes, "wow!", especially with the lovely Nimbus theme. Everyone already has Java installed and most have it pre-loaded/cached and the applet gets cached locally as well. Starts as fast as an AJAX app but is a *lot* more functional/intuitive to use. If you have basic web sites then AJAX is sufficient, for me an applet is a completely kick-ass solution (despite the naysayers who's mental model is applets from the 1990's, which appears to be you too).
Mono is the *incomplete* open source implementation of.NET. There, fixed it for ya. Dontcha know that Mono doesn't implement all the required libraries for true interoperability with.NET (the Mono team*are* working on this, but let's get real about where the state of play is).
Thanks for the disclaimer. What you're missing is that these people also want to use something that works *forever* (eg. no matter what Oracle chooses to do their contributions cannot be taken from them).
With Oracle suing Google over 'Java' (actually Android, so Oracle don't have an open and shut case here) they are not really winnng the hearts and minds of the rest of the tech world.
Oracle is currently damaging its own reputation in the eyes of the tech community. These people have long memories - look at how long the flaming of Microsoft endures no matter how many things Microsoft does to repair the damage. I'm afraid no amount of future PR budget will make up for Oracle's current attitude to the OS and Java ecosystem. Given that I am very fond of the platform independence of Java this is a great shame. I hope Oracle wakes up before they really ruin things both for themselves and for all the Javaphiles out there.
I was in Cuba a few years ago and knew slightly more Latin than Spanish. Whenever I didn't know a Spanish word I would use the Latin after adjusting for local pronounciation (of course, each country has its own dialect). Got me close enough most of the time. Luckily Spanish is very close to Latin (closer than Italian is, IMHO)
Latin used to be taught for three reasons:
a) The re-discovered Classics where fashionbable
b) Classical Latin is very both regular and unchanging, unlike English, which helps with its study.
c) To learn Latin you must learn the parts of speech (declining verbs, tenses, noun cases etc.). This helps learn the structure of languages in general.
You can still study it yourself - it just takes huge motivation to do so.
Work on software for maps (eg. roading in my case) and you need a lot of trig. In fact, I once had to calculate the direction of a perpendicular to a roadway so I whipped out my vector cross-product in 3D and reduced to 2D. The result was simple. Thing is, if I didn't know about it I simply couldn't use it (I wouldn't even know where to search for the solution since I couldn't ask the right questions).
In my spare time I do mods for games - mostly flight sims. Trig is essential all over the place. eg. calculate the indicated radar altimeter reading for an aircraft banked at 60 degrees. Its a basic trig problem. Or, calculate the slant range between your aircraft an your target, is this withing the Maverick seeker head limit? Does the line-of-sight between yourself and your wingman pass through a mountain and block radio comms? All require math.
Wish I had mod points at the moment. Great example.
Enrico Fermi was famous for doing calculations on the back of an envelope to get a feel for the scale of things. If more people did this we would get more reasoning about the relative significance of issues.
I programmed DirectX in it's first iterations and it was truly awful. DirectPlay for example had a static limit of 20 connections that were not refreshed, causing no end of problems [stale connections, crashes]. Did you have direct experience programming the first verisons of DirectX?
By DirectX 9 things of course are a lot better, but I haven't forgotten the early days even if newer programmers never knew them. DirectX was never so Microsoft could 'innovate', your don't know your IT history if you think it was, it was a deliberate ploy to balkanize the market. DirectX was patently inferior technology than the Farenheit it meant to replace and the networking effect of Windows was used to promote it. That's why John Carmack etc reviled DirectX, simply because at that time it was so poor. Surely you remember if you were developing to it at the time?
Later, DirectX overtook the sclerotic OpenGL and with rapid advancement, a lot of marketing and the seemingly inexorable advance of Windows it made sense to use DirectX and forget anything else. This seems to be where you formed your personal opinion of things.
However time has since advanced and the pendulum has now swung again in favour of multiple platforms and starting with DirectX is the wrong choice for these times. Either a wrapper library *or* OpenGl is the place to start these days. This requires you to be courageous enough to ditch platforms deliberately locked out by the vendor - as I am for my own software product, which needs decent performance so I choose OpenGL over extra inefficient abstraction. This is guaranteed to disappoint the development purist who seeks *extra* layers of abstraction (even if abstraction is already present) in the false believe that if a little abstraction is good than even more must be better. In my 20 years of development I've come to realize that too much abstraction is nearly as bad as too little - this is a hardened view from the trenches, not what some university wonk got a speaking tour and book gig on.
Dude, you need to try DCS: BlackShark or DCS: A-10C full flight simulators. Nothing dumbed about those puppies. If they're too undumb for you then try LockOn Modern Air Combat or rFactor for car racing. And it that is still too hard core then try Armed Assault II. If you can't take that then get a Wii.
Windows 7 is pretty darn good (I've paid, yes paid, for several personal copies) - although I use a lot of everything (various flavours of Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Solaris).
Cross-platform is what matters, as you state, and when Windows and Apple deliberately introduce balkanization that is bad and they ought to be called for it. That is why DirectX is bad, not the tech, but the fact it unnecessarily balkanizes the market. Why I prefer OpenGL to DirectX is that it used to be the *cross platform* library you mention. Sure there are other library that add even more abstraction to OpenGL, and they make sense if you can accept lower performance. When Microsoft introduces true cross platform technologies that work elsewhere as well (or almost as well) on other platforms then I have no problem with it (provided there are also independent implementations - no point getting shafted due to company politics).
Apart from context setup OpenGL used to run everywhere until those companies deliberatly introduced incompatibility. if OpenGL didn't run on Windows then I would be against it, the fact is that it runs almost everywhere including Windows and Apples, the XBox and older phones are the principal exceptions.
Have you developed a 3D app lately? You keep talking about 'code' when in fact most of the work is writing in a shader language so it sounds like you actually haven't for a while. Cg is abstract and platform independent and is as you suggest but so is GLSL. The platform-specific code part is a far less significant part of the application and really is only there to support getting the shaders going and managing buffers. Not like the old days at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends how you define 'career'. If you assume it is with one or a few companies then you'll almost certainly be disappointed. A 'portfolio career' is more relevant now, with greater mobility of ambitious employees between organizations. Don't let a company sucker you in to doing crap (eg. unpaid overtime if you are salaried) by dangling a 'career' carrot in front of you. It almost always is an illusion and when a company is struggling they'll ditch you quick if they have to.
For starters, one is a client side technology that doesn't even run in a JVM (its compiled down to javascript for christ sake) and one is a server side technology.
Again you have a limited grasp of the technology you are arguing about, since all you know is (a limited set of the) .NET technologies. GWT is both client and server side. It is interactive and developing for it is a dream compared to crufty old page-oriented server side technologies.
This is utterly false and complete vitriol. I challenge you to dig up a single, verifiable reference that somehow makes .NET as a specification more tied to Windows than any other platform.
Who cares about the language specification? pretty much only language hobbyists and academics. As in any software technology it is the libraries that matter. Without the libraries a wonderful language and runtime don't do much. .NET's libraries will always work better (or only, eg. WPF) on Windows. This is intentional by the vendor (it's why the invented the tech after all, if you were around then).
All the same with Mono, so what exactly is your point?
My point was *your* previous claim that Mono was better than Java for cross-platform work was bollox.
.NET is the superior spec from a technical standpoint. Java has a far bigger cross-platform ecosystem, but people are jumping ship and moving over to .NET in droves.
Again, the spec is less relevant than the libraries for practical use. If you are actually building real application software (cf. as opposed to working on Mono itself) you would know this. As far as implementation goes, why do you think the .NET licensing terms did not permit benchmarking? It's because in general the JVM is faster (I'm sure there are specific exceptions to this, but this is the general trend). The statistics also disagree with your second assertion about .NET growth. The trend is modest growth with a lot of fluctuation but not the 'droves' you claim. The droves are going to Objective-C and Android (Java-esque). Please see the following for the facts: .NET should lose further popularity as people move to Android and Objective-C as that is where all the market growth is. What you used to need a desktop or server for is slowly being marginalized for specialized stuff.
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
In fact, both Java and
I really don't care if you prefer java, as long as I don't have to maintain your crappy software. But your preference doesn't make java superior.
You wouldn't maintain my software. I'd never hire someone who eschews objective facts for unreasoning fanboyism with above-normal arrogance to boot. Face it, Mono is neat tech that is hasn't got much traction and is not going anywhere fast - not because it is misunderstood, but because it is well understood. That's why Java still has around three times the ecosystem as C# (according to the approximate figures given by Tiobe). If people want .NET they get the real thing, and if they're for Open Source they use other technologies instead (C/C++/Java etc). Enjoy Mono and the paycheck you get with it.
When is the last time you used mono? Sounds to me like you're basing your arguments off of mono circa 2-3 years ago. Mono is one of the most actively developed products in FOSS and each release marks a significant improvement.
Improved, yes, for sure. Adequate at this time for my purposes (and those of many others), no. There are still too many things missing (although it sounds like your use is limited so you haven't noticed). Mono will also always be behind the MS technologies on each release of .NET. Please note that I've used both the real .NET and Mono and would use them more if they were actually better than Java in the strategic sense. They aren't yet, but maybe one day - so please understand I'm not an unreasoning fanboi in this regard.
Yes. In fact, you can compile .net assemblies using Microsoft's toolset and literally copy the resulting binaries over (in the case of ASP.NET, at least, I haven't done this with winforms). Microsoft's toolset compiles down to the same, standardized intermediary language that mono has no problem using.
Yes we already know. This is no different to Java. What you are saying is, "Mono works for me" although you seem to be only using ASP.NET (which is a clone of the old JSP technology, people have moved on to GWT these days). The fact is Mono doesn't yet work for other people. How about you try winforms in anger, or even better, try doing something with WPF? You can't since WPF is neither supported and won't be (according to Mono's own webpages). Try telling Windows .NET developers they can't use WPF since it is non-portable. Not going to work. This is not the only unsupported major library, and won't be the last (since Microsoft periodically changes its technologies). This makes Mono non-portable and less superior to Java IMHO (which is why the enterprise makes more use of Java than .NET, even if it is less publicly visible to small-time developers).
No, ironically, it can't do it easily. Java's implementations are far more fragmented (I'm looking at you, OS X) than Mono, *by far.*
Bollox. My Java applications (both JEE and GUI) work sweetly without porting effort. I have done this many times over the decade and a half I've been using Java (alongside .NET, C++, FORTRAN, Perl etc). In fact, away from my professional life, I routinely give people Java GUI apps that I have not tested on their specific flavor of desktop and not one of them has had a problem due to Java (any bugs in my code are something different). With .NET you do have to worry about what platform you developed on and are going too when you're doing complex things (and god help you if your app used pinvoke to get stuff done - as is often necessary). Also, you may have missed the news that Apple and Oracle are jointly going to develop the OS X JDK/JRE, which will ensure standardized implementations.
Most people who have actually used mono recently would argue that .NET's platform abstraction is far better than Java's. Getting any complex application, whether java or .net, running on a new platform isn't trivial, although your assertion that its wildy easier with java is absurd.
You are wrong again, and you are asserting that Java (designed for multi-platform) is less portable than .NET (derived from the JVM's design principles but deliberately made specific to Windows to suit the vendor's strategic interests). Laughable. I do a lot of work on OS X and it works seamlessly when I move it to Win XP & 7 32-bit and 64-bit and Ubuntu. In the past I'd move my stuff from Win 95 to Irix and it worked sweetly without recompiling or configuring the environment (that's how long I've been doing Java, so I have some clues).
Trust me, now that I've heard your reply,
Because *all* of the .NET libraries do not work seemlessly on all platforms. Getting Windows developers to use the open-source libraries is a non-starter. Have you ever tried to port a .NET application written using the Microsoft toolset to other platforms. Java can do it easily, the .NET and Mono combo falls far short of this.
.NET application working off Windows (without resorting to horrible platform-specific hacks).
> This is an extremely ignorant statement on your behalf.
You labeled me as extremely ignorant without even waiting to hear my reply. I suggest next time you hide your prejudice about other posters better. Perhaps you're ignorant if you've never tried to work with getting a complex
Try writing a million-line application with fifty developers in Perl, Python or Ruby. Too hard. I know since I'm currently working on such a large project at the moment. Java and its tools are designed to scale in this way. Perl, Python, and Ruby are ok for smaller applications but simply can't scale development like Java. Hence, they are used in the Enterprise to solve smaller problems, but not this big ones.
.NET is not truly portable (and Mono is insufficient). Big outfits have more than only Windows. .NET can have all the syntactic sugar in the world and it is still a non-starter since it is not portable. This makes .NET very inferior to Java except for smaller companies. This is why .NET adoption is still vastly lower than Java in the corporate space and this is unlikely to change due to this strategic limitation of .NET. So your argument that .NET is superior is made on an academic and not a practical basis.
It is good you like Objective-C. The rest of us find it weak, has a lack of a big ecosystem of tools, essentially limited to one platform, and crap for large multi-threaded applications. Don't be surprised that the rest of us are not as fond of Objective-C as you are.
You obviously write smaller apps only. Write a large app (such as my current work project) and C#'s cross-platform limitations become apparent very rapidly.
C# is a solution if you are such a small organization you have Windows only. The big outfits have a bit-of-everything and this is why Java is so strong in the Enterprise and C# is not really a contender (although people used to desktop computing only usually don't realize this which is why they suggest C#, and the incompatibilities of Mono makes it simply not good enough for big outfits - especially when Java is so good).
Man I tried really really hard to build a decent interactive UI in GWT (the best of the bunch) and it was still far short of what I wanted. So I built an applet (as unfashionable as they might be) with a JAX-WS back end to the server and everyone who uses it goes, "wow!", especially with the lovely Nimbus theme. Everyone already has Java installed and most have it pre-loaded/cached and the applet gets cached locally as well. Starts as fast as an AJAX app but is a *lot* more functional/intuitive to use. If you have basic web sites then AJAX is sufficient, for me an applet is a completely kick-ass solution (despite the naysayers who's mental model is applets from the 1990's, which appears to be you too).
I think the term you want is, "submarine patent".
Mono is the *incomplete* open source implementation of .NET. There, fixed it for ya. Dontcha know that Mono doesn't implement all the required libraries for true interoperability with .NET (the Mono team*are* working on this, but let's get real about where the state of play is).
Mmmmmm, smoked cheddar. You can take all kinds of cheese to an event but it is the smoked cheddar that always gets devoured completely.
Strigiformes Obscuro! Wonder when the effect wears off?
.. haven't they seen what happens in Silent running?
If you re-read you'll notice this was not the DoD but DOI.
Thanks for the disclaimer. What you're missing is that these people also want to use something that works *forever* (eg. no matter what Oracle chooses to do their contributions cannot be taken from them).
With Oracle suing Google over 'Java' (actually Android, so Oracle don't have an open and shut case here) they are not really winnng the hearts and minds of the rest of the tech world.
Oracle is currently damaging its own reputation in the eyes of the tech community. These people have long memories - look at how long the flaming of Microsoft endures no matter how many things Microsoft does to repair the damage. I'm afraid no amount of future PR budget will make up for Oracle's current attitude to the OS and Java ecosystem. Given that I am very fond of the platform independence of Java this is a great shame. I hope Oracle wakes up before they really ruin things both for themselves and for all the Javaphiles out there.
I was in Cuba a few years ago and knew slightly more Latin than Spanish. Whenever I didn't know a Spanish word I would use the Latin after adjusting for local pronounciation (of course, each country has its own dialect). Got me close enough most of the time. Luckily Spanish is very close to Latin (closer than Italian is, IMHO)
Latin used to be taught for three reasons:
a) The re-discovered Classics where fashionbable
b) Classical Latin is very both regular and unchanging, unlike English, which helps with its study.
c) To learn Latin you must learn the parts of speech (declining verbs, tenses, noun cases etc.). This helps learn the structure of languages in general.
You can still study it yourself - it just takes huge motivation to do so.
You do know that Plato was Greek and spoke greek don't you?
Work on software for maps (eg. roading in my case) and you need a lot of trig. In fact, I once had to calculate the direction of a perpendicular to a roadway so I whipped out my vector cross-product in 3D and reduced to 2D. The result was simple. Thing is, if I didn't know about it I simply couldn't use it (I wouldn't even know where to search for the solution since I couldn't ask the right questions).
In my spare time I do mods for games - mostly flight sims. Trig is essential all over the place. eg. calculate the indicated radar altimeter reading for an aircraft banked at 60 degrees. Its a basic trig problem. Or, calculate the slant range between your aircraft an your target, is this withing the Maverick seeker head limit? Does the line-of-sight between yourself and your wingman pass through a mountain and block radio comms? All require math.
Wish I had mod points at the moment. Great example.
Enrico Fermi was famous for doing calculations on the back of an envelope to get a feel for the scale of things. If more people did this we would get more reasoning about the relative significance of issues.
Thanks for your post.
I programmed DirectX in it's first iterations and it was truly awful. DirectPlay for example had a static limit of 20 connections that were not refreshed, causing no end of problems [stale connections, crashes]. Did you have direct experience programming the first verisons of DirectX?
By DirectX 9 things of course are a lot better, but I haven't forgotten the early days even if newer programmers never knew them. DirectX was never so Microsoft could 'innovate', your don't know your IT history if you think it was, it was a deliberate ploy to balkanize the market. DirectX was patently inferior technology than the Farenheit it meant to replace and the networking effect of Windows was used to promote it. That's why John Carmack etc reviled DirectX, simply because at that time it was so poor. Surely you remember if you were developing to it at the time?
Later, DirectX overtook the sclerotic OpenGL and with rapid advancement, a lot of marketing and the seemingly inexorable advance of Windows it made sense to use DirectX and forget anything else. This seems to be where you formed your personal opinion of things.
However time has since advanced and the pendulum has now swung again in favour of multiple platforms and starting with DirectX is the wrong choice for these times. Either a wrapper library *or* OpenGl is the place to start these days. This requires you to be courageous enough to ditch platforms deliberately locked out by the vendor - as I am for my own software product, which needs decent performance so I choose OpenGL over extra inefficient abstraction. This is guaranteed to disappoint the development purist who seeks *extra* layers of abstraction (even if abstraction is already present) in the false believe that if a little abstraction is good than even more must be better. In my 20 years of development I've come to realize that too much abstraction is nearly as bad as too little - this is a hardened view from the trenches, not what some university wonk got a speaking tour and book gig on.
Dude, you need to try DCS: BlackShark or DCS: A-10C full flight simulators. Nothing dumbed about those puppies. If they're too undumb for you then try LockOn Modern Air Combat or rFactor for car racing. And it that is still too hard core then try Armed Assault II. If you can't take that then get a Wii.
See:
http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/
http://lockon.co.uk/
http://www.arma2.com/
http://www.rfactor.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smvv3IkglvQ LockOn trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLoBsD6VdHI BlackShark trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm8NIBjTDvs DCS:A-10C trailer
Windows 7 is pretty darn good (I've paid, yes paid, for several personal copies) - although I use a lot of everything (various flavours of Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Solaris).
Cross-platform is what matters, as you state, and when Windows and Apple deliberately introduce balkanization that is bad and they ought to be called for it. That is why DirectX is bad, not the tech, but the fact it unnecessarily balkanizes the market. Why I prefer OpenGL to DirectX is that it used to be the *cross platform* library you mention. Sure there are other library that add even more abstraction to OpenGL, and they make sense if you can accept lower performance. When Microsoft introduces true cross platform technologies that work elsewhere as well (or almost as well) on other platforms then I have no problem with it (provided there are also independent implementations - no point getting shafted due to company politics).
Apart from context setup OpenGL used to run everywhere until those companies deliberatly introduced incompatibility. if OpenGL didn't run on Windows then I would be against it, the fact is that it runs almost everywhere including Windows and Apples, the XBox and older phones are the principal exceptions.
Have you developed a 3D app lately? You keep talking about 'code' when in fact most of the work is writing in a shader language so it sounds like you actually haven't for a while. Cg is abstract and platform independent and is as you suggest but so is GLSL. The platform-specific code part is a far less significant part of the application and really is only there to support getting the shaders going and managing buffers. Not like the old days at all.