5 ms·

> devs wanted to use UNIX and Perl instead of VB/Delphi What do you think drove this? Presumably plenty of people in the dark mass of 9-to-5 devs were happy wi

> devs wanted to use UNIX and Perl instead of VB/Delphi What do you think drove this? Presumably plenty of people in the dark mass of 9-to-5 devs were happy with VB/Delphi. Jonathan Edwards has written [1] that VB came from "a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web." Did nerdy devs like me, with our adolescent anti-Microsoft attitude (speaking for myself anyway; I was born in 1980), ruin everything? [1]: https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=865 https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=865

mike_hearn 4y ago
The language and libraries situation on Windows wasn't great during this time. Delphi was good but a compiled language with manual memory management. It was very easy to write code that crashed, which would nuke the user's state leaving little evidence of what happened. It also had a lot of legacy quirks like not allowing circular dependencies between compilation units, networking support was poor (iirc TCP, HTTP and other classes required you to buy a third party library). The VCL was a wrapper around Win32, which had some great strengths but also really frustrating weaknesses e.g. extremely poor/non-existent layout management, poor support for typography and no support for styling or branding. There were many positive aspects of course. Microsoft gave you VB or C++, both with Win32 again. The C++ developer experience was horrid. VB was at least a scripting language with garbage collection, but, it was also constrained by the fact that B stood for "Beginners" so Microsoft were very reluctant to fix any of its legacy or add more powerful features. Compared to that situation, scripting languages and especially Perl had some massive advantages: 1. Ran on UNIX/Big Iron which is where all the best hardware and databases could be found. Lots of devs liked UNIX because it was CLI and developer oriented. 2. Unashamedly designed for experts with tons of powerful features, quality of life stuff like integrated regex, garbage collection, proper stack traces, error logs you could view via telnet within seconds etc. 2. CPAN provided an ever growing repository of open source libraries, instantly accessible, for free! On Windows there were very few libraries, they were mostly quite expensive and closed source, no easy way to discover them (pre-Google) and only C++/Delphi devs could write them. VB was sort of a consumer-only language. Open source culture started with RMS at the MIT AI lab and so was very UNIX centric for a long time. Arguably it still is. Really, it's hard to overstate how revolutionary proper garbage collection + CPAN was. GC is a force multiplier and CPAN is the granddaddy of all the open source library repositories we take for granted today. Imagine how unproductive you'd be without them. The big downside was that Perl had no UI libraries and didn't really run on Windows. So how do you use it to write apps for normal people? Then Netscape started adding interactivity features to the web and it was all totally text based. Text was Perl's forte! Add the <form> tag, CGI, HTTP and now you're cooking with gas. Bye bye hateful 0xC00005 Access Violation errors and useless bug reports like "I clicked a button and the app disappeared". The web was a huge step back for users, who went from having pretty sophisticated GUIs with fast table views, menus, shortcut keys, context menus, Office integration, working copy/paste, instant UI response etc to ... well, the web. But often users will suffer through that if it makes their devs more productive because all they really care about are features and competitive advantage. The web was crude but it let people escape the Windows ecosystem to one with open source + GC + pro languages + big iron UNIX.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
"a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web." There is revisionist history, and then there is that statement. That statement ... is almost offensive. ... Why did the "golden age" end? Because Microsoft sucked in so so so so so so so many ways. That statement is a bald faced lie, a whitewashing attempt to forgive Microsoft from inflicting millions of man years in damage to the IT industry over three decades of anticompetitive practices to keep their substandard software in a position of market dominance. But for anyone beyond the MCSE factory programmer (aka NOT the thought leaders of the industry) aside from those profiting handsomely from the Microsoft evil empire, did not like Microsoft. In the days of DOS, you had DOS or UNIX. Which was better? In the days of Windows in the 3.1 and even pretty much in the windows 95, you didn't have preemptive multitasking (something that non-windows had for 20 years at that point). It crashed CONSTANTLY, had no security, required restarts for practically anything that was installed. Meanwhile the UNIX people would brag about machines not being rebooted for years. This was before the constant patch cycle was a thing. Microsoft's apis were slapdash and disorganized, and frequently went out of favor. During this time Microsoft would constantly crush and screw over competitors and engage in constant anticompetitive behavior. If you didn't suck on the teat of Microsoft, your platform was under unrelenting assault, not by pure technical achievement, but by the full smorgasborg of corporate dirty tricks, FUD, bribery/kickbacks, lobbying, lies, secret apis, golf schmoozing with nontechnical CIOs to close deals, no or undermined standards, etc. The graveyard is long: Sybase, Lotus 123, Netscape, Novell. The Microsoft times were a time of being stuck with one option: and OS that crashed constantly or is utterly porous to attackers. A browser that has incompatible web apis and a disbanded developer team (IE 6) that gets corporate mandated and is a thorn in your side in the entire IT stack for two decades. Databases stolen from companies (Sybase signed SUCH a bad deal, it astonishes me to this day) running on platforms that can't stay up. Office software with inaccessible file formats and byzantine and closed programmatic apis for accessing it. A substandard desktop UI. If you used Microsoft software with an ounce of historical knowledge or awareness, you could see the prison. You had no practical choices. All the executives in your company were bought and paid for. Microsoft had sales forces that tracked non-Microsoft systems and targeted them within companies by any means necessary. Every new piece of software written in MIcrosoft had to pay the "sociopath management tax" and go through extensive reviews on how it could be used to further or maintain Microsoft's empire and control. Their software was deliberately dumped in beta form onto the market to crowd out the competitors. None of this is an "adolescent" attitude. I'll repeat myself: MILLIONS OF MAN HOURS OF DAMAGE. You know, probably billions. Decades x tens of millions of workers. This isn't just IT programmer frustration. This is bad applications forced on non-programmer users. This is better companies, better software, better IT industry denied proper funding and profits. Instead, Microsoft took trillions of dollars in revenues from them. This is undermining a free market, free ideas, and freedom for Microsoft's profit.

mike_hearn 4y ago

The language and libraries situation on Windows wasn't great during this time. Delphi was good but a compiled language with manual memory management. It was very easy to write code that crashed, which would nuke the user's state leaving little evidence of what happened. It also had a lot of legacy quirks like not allowing circular dependencies between compilation units, networking support was poor (iirc TCP, HTTP and other classes required you to buy a third party library). The VCL was a wrapper around Win32, which had some great strengths but also really frustrating weaknesses e.g. extremely poor/non-existent layout management, poor support for typography and no support for styling or branding. There were many positive aspects of course. Microsoft gave you VB or C++, both with Win32 again. The C++ developer experience was horrid. VB was at least a scripting language with garbage collection, but, it was also constrained by the fact that B stood for "Beginners" so Microsoft were very reluctant to fix any of its legacy or add more powerful features. Compared to that situation, scripting languages and especially Perl had some massive advantages: 1. Ran on UNIX/Big Iron which is where all the best hardware and databases could be found. Lots of devs liked UNIX because it was CLI and developer oriented. 2. Unashamedly designed for experts with tons of powerful features, quality of life stuff like integrated regex, garbage collection, proper stack traces, error logs you could view via telnet within seconds etc. 2. CPAN provided an ever growing repository of open source libraries, instantly accessible, for free! On Windows there were very few libraries, they were mostly quite expensive and closed source, no easy way to discover them (pre-Google) and only C++/Delphi devs could write them. VB was sort of a consumer-only language. Open source culture started with RMS at the MIT AI lab and so was very UNIX centric for a long time. Arguably it still is. Really, it's hard to overstate how revolutionary proper garbage collection + CPAN was. GC is a force multiplier and CPAN is the granddaddy of all the open source library repositories we take for granted today. Imagine how unproductive you'd be without them. The big downside was that Perl had no UI libraries and didn't really run on Windows. So how do you use it to write apps for normal people? Then Netscape started adding interactivity features to the web and it was all totally text based. Text was Perl's forte! Add the <form> tag, CGI, HTTP and now you're cooking with gas. Bye bye hateful 0xC00005 Access Violation errors and useless bug reports like "I clicked a button and the app disappeared". The web was a huge step back for users, who went from having pretty sophisticated GUIs with fast table views, menus, shortcut keys, context menus, Office integration, working copy/paste, instant UI response etc to ... well, the web. But often users will suffer through that if it makes their devs more productive because all they really care about are features and competitive advantage. The web was crude but it let people escape the Windows ecosystem to one with open source + GC + pro languages + big iron UNIX.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

"a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web." There is revisionist history, and then there is that statement. That statement ... is almost offensive. ... Why did the "golden age" end? Because Microsoft sucked in so so so so so so so many ways. That statement is a bald faced lie, a whitewashing attempt to forgive Microsoft from inflicting millions of man years in damage to the IT industry over three decades of anticompetitive practices to keep their substandard software in a position of market dominance. But for anyone beyond the MCSE factory programmer (aka NOT the thought leaders of the industry) aside from those profiting handsomely from the Microsoft evil empire, did not like Microsoft. In the days of DOS, you had DOS or UNIX. Which was better? In the days of Windows in the 3.1 and even pretty much in the windows 95, you didn't have preemptive multitasking (something that non-windows had for 20 years at that point). It crashed CONSTANTLY, had no security, required restarts for practically anything that was installed. Meanwhile the UNIX people would brag about machines not being rebooted for years. This was before the constant patch cycle was a thing. Microsoft's apis were slapdash and disorganized, and frequently went out of favor. During this time Microsoft would constantly crush and screw over competitors and engage in constant anticompetitive behavior. If you didn't suck on the teat of Microsoft, your platform was under unrelenting assault, not by pure technical achievement, but by the full smorgasborg of corporate dirty tricks, FUD, bribery/kickbacks, lobbying, lies, secret apis, golf schmoozing with nontechnical CIOs to close deals, no or undermined standards, etc. The graveyard is long: Sybase, Lotus 123, Netscape, Novell. The Microsoft times were a time of being stuck with one option: and OS that crashed constantly or is utterly porous to attackers. A browser that has incompatible web apis and a disbanded developer team (IE 6) that gets corporate mandated and is a thorn in your side in the entire IT stack for two decades. Databases stolen from companies (Sybase signed SUCH a bad deal, it astonishes me to this day) running on platforms that can't stay up. Office software with inaccessible file formats and byzantine and closed programmatic apis for accessing it. A substandard desktop UI. If you used Microsoft software with an ounce of historical knowledge or awareness, you could see the prison. You had no practical choices. All the executives in your company were bought and paid for. Microsoft had sales forces that tracked non-Microsoft systems and targeted them within companies by any means necessary. Every new piece of software written in MIcrosoft had to pay the "sociopath management tax" and go through extensive reviews on how it could be used to further or maintain Microsoft's empire and control. Their software was deliberately dumped in beta form onto the market to crowd out the competitors. None of this is an "adolescent" attitude. I'll repeat myself: MILLIONS OF MAN HOURS OF DAMAGE. You know, probably billions. Decades x tens of millions of workers. This isn't just IT programmer frustration. This is bad applications forced on non-programmer users. This is better companies, better software, better IT industry denied proper funding and profits. Instead, Microsoft took trillions of dollars in revenues from them. This is undermining a free market, free ideas, and freedom for Microsoft's profit.