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What's always seemed weird about that, to me, is that I've never been surprised when some lone hacker — who is not the developer of the tool in question — volun
by pohl 4y ago
What's always seemed weird about that, to me, is that I've never been surprised when some lone hacker — who is not the developer of the tool in question — volunteers to use the PA-RISC machine they have access to make something work in that environment. Contrast that with the Windows world, where maybe two thirds of all developers that exist on the planet use Windows, somehow they still can't find one bloke who'll do the same work there. How can the Windows world be so rich with talented professionals but still never seem to find one who'll contribute a patch.
- jameshart 4y agoWell, it’s often not just a ‘patch’, is it? If the software is written in ways that deeply embed assumptions of POSIX-derived concepts then it’s not just popping in a few extra #ifdef WINDOWS blocks.
- rbanffy 4y agoMost software shouldn’t be looking to the OS that closely anyway and anything that has to interact closely with the platform in non-portable ways should be, in an ideal world, separated into its own library so it never needs to be ported to anything other than the platform it calls home.
- rbanffy 4y ago> How can the Windows world be so rich with talented professionals but still never seem to find one who'll contribute a patch. The obvious explanation is that the set of Windows users that are also competent and willing to work on these projects is almost empty.
- jameshart 4y ago“Why will nobody from the Windows community contribute to our software? Is it because I said that my baseline assumption is that they’re all incompetent?”
- rbanffy 4y agoI know plenty of extremely competent software developers that are Windows users but, it seems, they use different software. The intersection I found was people inclined to help who are forced by corporate powers to use Windows on environments where WSL doesn’t work well (I’m one of those).