Re: Programming Language Productivity: The Stupidity of Programmers

From: Tak To (takto_at_alum.mit.edu.-)
Date: 11/18/03 

Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 18:15:37 -0500

Thant Tessman wrote:
> It is blindingly obvious that compatibility with industry standards has
> never been a high priority for Microsoft. More than that, Microsoft
> seems to deliberately avoid--as much as the market will allow--making
> developers' lives easier in any way that might favor their competition
> at their expense. I'm not a free software nut. I don't consider this
> somehow criminal, or unique to Microsoft. It is, however, foolish to
> pretend either that this isn't true, or that it isn't something
> developers should take into consideration.

Whether Microsoft has the habit of deliberate incompatibility is
not the issue that I am concerned with in this thread; the issue is
whether the example of _near and _far is really supports the
above claim.

I have no intention of defending MS in general, and I think some of
their acts in the past were down right despicable. (E.g., they
sabotaged the entire DOS extender industry by announcing the
DPMI 1.0 spec, promising Window's compliance then failing to deliver
it.) However, in the case of _near and _far I think MS is not guilty
of deliberate incompatibility.

Tak