Did Microsoft lost the API war?
Joel’s latest article confused me a bit. Isn’t it that Visual Basic really sucks, and I mean really sucks! Let’s say it sucks terribly bad for doing anything other then drag and drop RAD development. At least for people that know a thing or two about JAVA. C++ is a great tool for the more experienced developer, but since Microsoft messed up with COM, we’ve been left with a confusing, difficult programming model. Not to mention DCOM, COM+ etc. Joel is right about memory management though, but I personally don’t consider it to be a show stopper.
Now we have .NET, it’s a great platform today, I don’t care about 2006, most likely it’ll be a great platform in 2006+. I’ll even consider investing development time to run my applications on mono (who would have thought of that? I’m not geek enough to fit in with the Tux clan). No ROI, heck I’ll interop. If it wasn’t for .NET I would be doing JAVA (I probably would If I stayed away from CORBA).
So besides Microsoft refusing to fix .NET bugs today, overloading developers with 2006 stuff, what’s the big deal?