I know you probably haven't had that experience - you're a *techie*. Most people are like my landlord - he bought his machine, he tried to keep it up to date (and really, why should you have to even do that?), and it just got worse and worse, until he decided to buy a new one. I took a look at it, and dear god it was bad. I asked him why he hadn't run a particular update "Because I was afraid it would break it worse." Valid fear, given my experiences at work.
And you're dead wrong - imagine no DLL hell, no reboots to update critical system resources, and apps that automatically gain new functionality as the underlying libraries are updated, no recompile needed. Those *directly* affect every user out there. (And most of that is available now on the Mac...)
Thinking that an improved programming environment won't affect the end users is thinking too small - I'm not talking about small, incremental changes to an IDE, I'm talking about completely rethinking how an OS and user space work, and directly supporting them in the languages. .NET is, on paper, an attempt to do this, but they're so hobbled by backwards compatibility that if they ever manage to pull it off in a meaningful way, it'll take another decade. They're their own anchor, as well as everyone else's.
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Date: 2007-10-24 02:15 am (UTC)I know you probably haven't had that experience - you're a *techie*. Most people are like my landlord - he bought his machine, he tried to keep it up to date (and really, why should you have to even do that?), and it just got worse and worse, until he decided to buy a new one. I took a look at it, and dear god it was bad. I asked him why he hadn't run a particular update "Because I was afraid it would break it worse." Valid fear, given my experiences at work.
And you're dead wrong - imagine no DLL hell, no reboots to update critical system resources, and apps that automatically gain new functionality as the underlying libraries are updated, no recompile needed. Those *directly* affect every user out there. (And most of that is available now on the Mac...)
Thinking that an improved programming environment won't affect the end users is thinking too small - I'm not talking about small, incremental changes to an IDE, I'm talking about completely rethinking how an OS and user space work, and directly supporting them in the languages. .NET is, on paper, an attempt to do this, but they're so hobbled by backwards compatibility that if they ever manage to pull it off in a meaningful way, it'll take another decade. They're their own anchor, as well as everyone else's.
Well, almost everyone's. ;)