I weep for the lost souls of those poor benighted developers still stuck on Windows. No, no wait. why should we care about Windows developers? If they're still stuck there most likely they are deeply committed to the Microsoft Visual Studio toolset, in which case they don't (or can't) care about what goes on in the rest of the universe, and they really don't matter. (By which of course I mean that as fellow human beings they matter, and of course I have sympathy for their suffering, but by their own choice they are locked in such an impregnable ivory tower that it is neither practical nor economic to try to break in and rescue them)

Other than that, who else uses Windows? Oh yes, you have corporate teams doing 'enterprise' Java. They'll typically be using some colossally retarded Ant build system that takes 7-30 minutes to run (sadly, I'm not even exaggerating for dramatic effect). The problem with Ant is it is so easy to just bolt on 'one more thing' that it rapidly evolves to some horrible beast of a thing that lumbers around sucking everything into it, Katamari Damacy style. Really, there's no help for them either. You can't for example suggest that blowing away the entire database and recreating it from scratch in order to run the entire set of automated unit tests is something best left to the continuous integration server, or that should be done once a day - maybe out of hours or at lunchtime. No no, it has to be done every time you do a build. And that doesn't even touch on the ginormous mess that is the enterprise components, where each application server has its own arcane and unholy rituals to create its beans from the blood of unicorns and tears of virgin developers... try messing with that abomination and you're in for a world of pain. There's just no helping them either, though in their case usually they want to be helped, but they are captive to the primary problem of enterprise development, which is that the people who choose technologies and mandate tools and processes are usually so far removed from the actual use of those tools as to be completely immune to the pain, and unable or unwilling to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the programmers.

Don't even get me started on checkstyle with rules like no line can be longer than 80 characters (despite there being absolutely no good reason for this other than the horrible horrible UI of eclipse - in the absence of that you can easily get way more than 80 characters on the screen).

twitch