For the Windoze haters - VS2005

There are fanatics everywhere - also in the Linux crowd. Reasonable people adopt whatever happen to solve the problem at hand with the least amount of trouble.

I think Python does most things well and I personally like the "anti-Perl'ness" design of Python: "There shall be one obvious way to do a task, that obvious way being the most effective way" (Most serious Python programmers are good with Perl too ;-).

kind of

use

I'm

That is what most commercial programming is all about:

Stiching together several applications and services so that the client will see an application that does what he wants done and the developers do not have to develop (an maintain!) a vast monolith from scratch. Scripting is the glue that binds it all together.

The inverse problem is what I commonly see amongst engineers posing as developers:

Often the customer wants some kind of management/scripting and ends up needing BOTH a CLI and a GUI - but all that the newbie developer can do is a GUI welded together with an application so the combine demands a user sitting in front of the specific kind of hardware the developer happened to write it on.

Exactly! Monkey see, Monkey do - and - Monkey work for peanuts!!

Anyone who claims to be a "100% linux genius" yet calls python crap, is far from a genius, and certainly far from being an "academic" programmer (python being particularly common in academic circles, and under the leadership of a mathematician "benevolent dictator for life").

Python is very much cross-platform, and any linux installation is likely to have a fair number of python programs installed, for daemons, command-line programs, gui programs, and big server stuff.

GooSoft

With a market cap of $108B, I don't even think BillyG can afford to buy Google. Though with a "few" more weeks like the last...

Well, one of the differences is that you can no longer directly control hardware. ;-) IMO, this is a good thing.

The other major difference is that XP (sorta) works. I prefer Win2K, though XP has some nice features (better multi-display support and it's *much* better at switching between docked and mobile operation).

The parallel port has over the years been a godsend. Be lost without it. Over time have developed a severe incompatability problem with the supplied datasheeets for each new ADC, DAC, DDS (ie, programmable digital devices) that I want to design into kit. Before use, I now string each new device onto the LPT and run it straight from PowerBasic. Once sorted can then translate the minimalised Basic statements straight across the screen into the machine code listing for the Pic etc. Saved untold hours of frustration.

E.g the AD7680 ADC put in some kit last month took 2 minutes to wire to the LPT and 30 minutes to scan the 'datasheet' write a program, figure the correct sequencing and test out the ADC options. (Alas, no longer on this PC but on a couple of DOS/Win98s I keep specially for the job :). John

There are a few programs around that muck the x86 i/o permissions map to let you do ins/outs under 2k and XP. TOTALIO is one.

John

As long as it works for you, great, but if you are looking for a more "contemporary" solution, there are plenty of

I thought this was a good thing until today. I had to find a bug that had been plaguing this business for ten years or so, back to the old NT4 sp1 days. They had designed a PCI card and written a driver. This is the single worst interface I have ever seen in my life. Sure MS provides a defined interface to hardware, but these guys had completely f***ed it up. After seeing this, i wonder whether the whole hardware abstraction thing works. My guess is it works fine for video cards and the like, but custom/small time work is a different story.

By the way, there are some publicly free device drivers that allow you to write directly to hardware. Can give any lionks off the top of my head, but they do exist.

Win2k is a buttered up version of NT4. Now if you want a server OS, Win2k3 is it, XP for client apps. I notice now that the licencing for servers and MSSQL has caught up with the big players too.

I had to sit back and think about what you just said, and I am still not sure exactly what you are trying to suggest. But from what i can understand is that you are saying that because the newbie knows windows, then the user has to use windows?

Perhaps, but to provide a functional, usable product that actually works is not that easy. Given a good set of tools the time to market is reduced dramatically. I like to think its like comparing a hand saw to a power tool. Both can produce exceptional resuts in the right hands, its just the power tool is much faster.

In article , Joel Kolstad wrote: [....]

Put them side by side and remember which keyboard works which.

It works fine for most all drivers if the programmers actually follow the spec! In my experience, the biggest violations of the HAL "model" that still results in -- mostly -- working drivers are: (1) no use of synchronization objects (mutexes, etc.) when there should be... this will often work on uniprocessor machines (even big companies that certainly have the resources to "get it right" such as Creative Labs have released drivers that crapped out on multiprocessor computers); indeed, there are a_great_ many programming errors you can "get away with" on uniprocessor machines!, and (2) no use of the functions that translates "logical" addresses to "physical" addresses on, e.g., a PCI bus... this works because, on x86 machines, they're often identical values for the sake of efficiency. But this breaks drivers when they're re-compiled for architectures (PowerPC, ARM... hmm... what does MS even still support these days?) where that isn't true.

KVM switches work fairly well (can't seem to get one to work for my RS6000).

OK. Describe Google based on its UI.

Genuine multithreading is a big issue these days which very few understand. I think MS has made a huge mistake by making this easily avalaible to the standard 'i read a book now i can program' type programmer. I despise powerbuilder, but by making multithreading hard to access is probably the single best thing that product offers.

I read a paper a few months ago that said if you dont know why not to use concurrency, then you should never use it.

I would laugh, but sadly i have been bitten by this very same multiproc bug!!! In saying that, i have learned a great deal about concurrency since then.

I have never really had the opportunity to write true cross platform code. All my customers/employers have dictated what platform they wish to use. In an embedded world, i think there is very little call for cross platform. In a generic, consumer world it is a different story. I have never mass prodeuced for a consumer market.

Ok, describe the google architecture then tell me that the GUI is not important.

Hmm:

I am trying to say that in my experience Interfaces/GUI's are best kept out of the application as much as possible, but, that people have learned to program monolithic programs with "rich" GUI's. CPU time gets cheaper all the time, Human time is expensive so agressive automation is neccessesary - the impermeable GUI's prevents that.

I also see the GUI code getting seriously in the way of actual design - the "design idiom" of "we need 200++ levels of abstraction before one gets to the actual work" seem to infect the core of tools written in Java+Swing f.ex.. Objects hierachies that are uncomfortably mapped to the physical GUI layout is another common form of "GUI leakage". To be "interactive" the GUI

• Application will involve Threads (Threads are at best a performance hack and often a rich source of runtime bugs and wierd platform implementation issues).

The thinking, design, and debugging becomes much clearer when things are split in "Engine" "Presentation" running in separate processes.

O.T.O.H it is always fun to watch some poor desperate sap flub a network demo when they have to run around and configure eight computer systems in eight GUI's because they have no scripting, no remote access, no commandline configuration and no clue. The whip teaches ;-]

Agree! I guess the analogy, I am grasping for, is the D.I.Y-enthusiast that - watching too much TeeVee on home renovation and eager to use his latest tools - blindly gets himself into jobs that should perhaps be left to a crew of skilled builders .... repeatedly. ;-)

Like myself attempting to both plaster & paint a room where I should have realised there would be sufficient honour in painting ....

A couple years when I was using RS6000's, I had 2 of them, with another 2 pcs hooked to a Black Box (that's the brand...) KVM, and it worked just fine. Those KVMs were standard issue here at work.