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And another 5 years of students will have a new layer of Microsoft obfuscation to muddle through until they sort out that the *nix world is the better alternati

And another 5 years of students will have a new layer of Microsoft obfuscation to muddle through until they sort out that the *nix world is the better alternative.

jemfinch 6y ago
This kind of vapid triumphalism adds nothing to the conversation.
- jonsen 6y ago
  Oh, it did add something for me. It actually triggered som perspective thoughts I otherwise wouldn’t have had.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  I don't find that comment to be vapid at all -- it describes a real phenomenon that has occurred in the past and seems likely to be occurring again.
durnygbur 6y ago
I feel the deepest sorrow for anyone who will have to debug, troubleshoot, and extend byzantine overengineered apps. Iframes, multi-level loading spinners, piles of boilerplate code, browser lock-in, dozens of background calls to tracking, license and what-not services. The consultants paid by the hour, creating first mockups with this tool will have fun, no doubt. Non IT-savvy companies with too much cash will have an illusion that they have a working application, no doubt.
- ryanjshaw 6y ago
  Your fears are not applicable in my experience. Model-driven PowerApps are schema and workflow driven, using one set of tools. The plumbing is all standardised. Authentication, authorisation and license management integrates directly into the M365 infrastructure that large organisations already have. As for browser lock-in, this makes no sense - Microsoft Edge has moved to Chromium. In my experience, the trend is for internal IT to use these tools directly, but it wouldn't matter even if a consultant did the work - the solutions are built on a standardised stack fully owned by the business. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant percentage of LOB applications are built on this platform in the next decade.
  - tanseydavid 6y ago
    >> As for browser lock-in, this makes no sense - Microsoft Edge has moved to Chromium. In practice, it absolutely makes a difference.
pjmlp 6y ago
The Xerox PARC and VMS worlds are a much better option.
ryanjshaw 6y ago
Please share how a business user with spreadsheet-level tech skills is able to build a line of business application on *nix? Because that's what PowerApps makes possible.
- jonsen 6y ago
  You could interpret the comment as: Students, our future developers and power users, should not be locked up in their perspective, but be set free to choose the best for their future endeavors.
  - ryanjshaw 6y ago
    Sure, use the best tool. But the reality is nothing comes close to what Microsoft is building. As a consultant, when an organisation is already heavily invested in M365 then a PowerApp-based solution is a no brainer except for specialized requirements (eg low latency, complex or big data processing, etc.) The pricing model seems to be the only major issue I can see right now.
    - jonsen 6y ago
      I can’t argue with that. That was not my point.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  To further this point, I know someone (who had little to no code exp) who at the start of this pandemic built an entire app to help his company deal with processing attendance and all the other things that suddenly appeared out of no where, using nothing but PowerApps and other O365 products.
fsloth 6y ago
Microsoft has a lots of good stuff. Judging them by their worst offering is like judging *nix by it's worst.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Because as we all know, learning the ins and outs of commands designed for teletypes with 50 years of incremental evolution, where the only common interchange format is ASCII, and all sitting atop kernels that think fork() is a good idea, is extremely pleasant.
- cben 6y ago
  Yes and no. Learning UNIX is a bit like learning LISP - the parentheses don't look "exteremely pleasant" but having (1) a shared serialization format (2) common programmatic interface (3) a culture of REPLs makes everything much more discoverable and gives you power you would never get where each interface is a shiny bespoke thing. There a lot of kludges, especially around teletypes/terminals, yes. But the common interchange format being ~ASCII~ UTF-8 makes learning the ins and outs way more pleasant than if everything gets connected by COM, .dll APIs, inscrutable .inf files or whatever Microsoft thinks up at a given decade (you can notice I've stayed away for a while)... Now Excel stands aside as as environment where learning _was_ pleasant, everything had an inspectable representation and a shared interface! Despite arrays bounds and reuse-by-copy-paste being messy, spreadsheets remain a sweet spot of bringing power to "low-code" users. I didn't look into this specific project enough to say where falls on lock-in-vs-interoperability scale, but IMHO the world needs more "spreadsheet plus" experimentation so I wish them the best...

And another 5 years of students will have a new layer of Microsoft obfuscation to muddle through until they sort out that the *nix world is the better alternative.

jemfinch 6y ago

This kind of vapid triumphalism adds nothing to the conversation.

jonsen 6y ago
Oh, it did add something for me. It actually triggered som perspective thoughts I otherwise wouldn’t have had.
tanseydavid 6y ago
I don't find that comment to be vapid at all -- it describes a real phenomenon that has occurred in the past and seems likely to be occurring again.

durnygbur 6y ago

I feel the deepest sorrow for anyone who will have to debug, troubleshoot, and extend byzantine overengineered apps. Iframes, multi-level loading spinners, piles of boilerplate code, browser lock-in, dozens of background calls to tracking, license and what-not services. The consultants paid by the hour, creating first mockups with this tool will have fun, no doubt. Non IT-savvy companies with too much cash will have an illusion that they have a working application, no doubt.

ryanjshaw 6y ago
Your fears are not applicable in my experience. Model-driven PowerApps are schema and workflow driven, using one set of tools. The plumbing is all standardised. Authentication, authorisation and license management integrates directly into the M365 infrastructure that large organisations already have. As for browser lock-in, this makes no sense - Microsoft Edge has moved to Chromium. In my experience, the trend is for internal IT to use these tools directly, but it wouldn't matter even if a consultant did the work - the solutions are built on a standardised stack fully owned by the business. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant percentage of LOB applications are built on this platform in the next decade.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  >> As for browser lock-in, this makes no sense - Microsoft Edge has moved to Chromium. In practice, it absolutely makes a difference.

pjmlp 6y ago

The Xerox PARC and VMS worlds are a much better option.

ryanjshaw 6y ago

Please share how a business user with spreadsheet-level tech skills is able to build a line of business application on *nix? Because that's what PowerApps makes possible.

jonsen 6y ago
You could interpret the comment as: Students, our future developers and power users, should not be locked up in their perspective, but be set free to choose the best for their future endeavors.
- ryanjshaw 6y ago
  Sure, use the best tool. But the reality is nothing comes close to what Microsoft is building. As a consultant, when an organisation is already heavily invested in M365 then a PowerApp-based solution is a no brainer except for specialized requirements (eg low latency, complex or big data processing, etc.) The pricing model seems to be the only major issue I can see right now.
  - jonsen 6y ago
    I can’t argue with that. That was not my point.
vxNsr 6y ago
To further this point, I know someone (who had little to no code exp) who at the start of this pandemic built an entire app to help his company deal with processing attendance and all the other things that suddenly appeared out of no where, using nothing but PowerApps and other O365 products.

fsloth 6y ago

Microsoft has a lots of good stuff. Judging them by their worst offering is like judging *nix by it's worst.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

Because as we all know, learning the ins and outs of commands designed for teletypes with 50 years of incremental evolution, where the only common interchange format is ASCII, and all sitting atop kernels that think fork() is a good idea, is extremely pleasant.

cben 6y ago
Yes and no. Learning UNIX is a bit like learning LISP - the parentheses don't look "exteremely pleasant" but having (1) a shared serialization format (2) common programmatic interface (3) a culture of REPLs makes everything much more discoverable and gives you power you would never get where each interface is a shiny bespoke thing. There a lot of kludges, especially around teletypes/terminals, yes. But the common interchange format being ~ASCII~ UTF-8 makes learning the ins and outs way more pleasant than if everything gets connected by COM, .dll APIs, inscrutable .inf files or whatever Microsoft thinks up at a given decade (you can notice I've stayed away for a while)... Now Excel stands aside as as environment where learning _was_ pleasant, everything had an inspectable representation and a shared interface! Despite arrays bounds and reuse-by-copy-paste being messy, spreadsheets remain a sweet spot of bringing power to "low-code" users. I didn't look into this specific project enough to say where falls on lock-in-vs-interoperability scale, but IMHO the world needs more "spreadsheet plus" experimentation so I wish them the best...