Re: So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye.

After 23 years as an independent programmer, most of them with Turbo
Pascal and Delphi, I'm taking a full-time job, doing straight C on
embedded Linux. I start ... Monday (Jan 22)

Thanks for all the nice notes, and for the surge in both site traffic
and book sales.

I'm not looking forward to the commuting, but I am looking forward to
steady work (I got really tired of the "bust" part of the
boom-and-bust cycle) and to doing something new. Novelty is always
good, and this will strengthen my resume in the sort of 'industrial
computing' that's in strong demand in Silicon Valley. Maybe my next
job will be at Google ... in any event, cell phone operating systems
are closer to the consumer than the sort of corporate IT that I've
been doing for the last twelve years.

I don't think it's fair to take my move as any sort of indicator of
the health of either .NET or Delphi. I had multiple offers and turned
down a contract at HP, doing Delphi and C# at a decent rate, in order
to take this job. I'm taking a job, not a contract; the commute is not
quite as bad; and this job seems more interesting to me at this time.

I can't say that I'm 100% thrilled about Ansi C (I reread K&R this
week, and blanched at the function pointer syntax) and I do have my
qualms about giving up tools (from object orientation to garbage
collection and the FCL) that were introduced as good solutions to real
problems, but they decided that C++ was not appropriate for machines
with modest memory and I suppose I have to agree. While a 400 MHz
processor doesn't sound so bad (I sure was able to get away with an
awful lot of simple, brute-force code on much slower machines) C++
does make for large executables ... and .NET does rely on having lots
of RAM. Still, good shops have managed to turn out good code in
straight C, and this does seem like a good shop: sharp guys, who 'get'
the point of code reviews and unit tests.

Overall, I'm looking forward to it.

--

..NET 2.0 for Delphi Programmers
www.midnightbeach.com/.net
.

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