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Comment by ticmasta | Hacker News Reader

As a developer MS has treated me really well, IMO. They churn out as much short-lived tech as the next company but I think their windows-based culture of backwards compatibility carried over into the developer ecosystem, and the future of .Net Core running in Linux containers with docker and k8s, against SQL Server on Linux would make anyone who's been away from their tech for the past 5 years think they stepped out of a time machine.

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On backwards compatibility. I recently learned that apple has deprecated OpenGL and soon will not support it at all. What a slap to developers... so yeah there is some value to Microsofts approach.

There is an advantage and a disadvantage to backwards compatibility. Letting people keep using old technology that hampers progress. You have to devote resources to ensuring that it still works, and you have less people using the new stuff.

Apple isn't afraid of ditching tech when it becomes clear it's a dead end. In almost all cases they've been correct and the rest of the industry soon follows their leads.

Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.

> In almost all cases they've been correct and the rest of the industry soon follows their leads.

Counterpoint: 3.5mm jacks are perfectly fine and were never a "dead end".

OpenGL's indeed pretty crusty, but Vulkan is not. Apple would be better off participating in that ecosystem instead of letting NIH syndrome take hold.

> Think how reliable Windows would be today if they hadn't left in all the cruft as far back as Windows 2000.

Counterpoint: an x86 Linux executable statically compiled/linked any time after the a.out → ELF migration (so... predating Windows 2000) can be expected to run without issue on a bleeding-edge x86 kernel today (and if it's not able to do so, then that's a bug, and Linus will personally descend upon and eviscerate the one unfortunate enough to have introduced that bug).

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