Hacker News Reader

Comment by iron_ball | Hacker News Reader

Because now Windows PCs are viewed as sexy, powerful, and easy to use devices that make you cool and productive, while Apple computers are not.

View on HN

Because Windows PCs are well known to be friendly to developers, with a lovely, powerful Win32 API that's a joy to use, has no horrible warts and... oh. wait.

Thanks to an accident of history (NeXT) combined with Apple killing backwards compatibility with OS9 down, they have a really developer-friendly API compared to Windows. On a purely technical level, Apple is far more developer-friendly than Windows.

They are doing their very best to shit that all away though, when it comes to the legal and backwards-compatibility side of things. That's one reason I doubt I'll ever spend my money on Apple.

That makes Apple friendly to new developers, but I would say that the backwards compatibility guarantee that Microsoft gives is pretty friendly. It's nice to know that your program will run forever, no matter what changes take place.

2 points:

1. the Win32 API is not the only thing to develop on Windows with. Personally, I find C# &.NET to be much more comfortable to program in than Objective-C & Cocoa.

2. There is no silver bullet. Some platforms are better at some things than others, but it's largely a matter of accidental complexity.

I'm not sure what your point is. I was talking about the iPhone only, not Macs.

That was actually true back in the early 1990s, when the Windows-Android comparison was valid.

See, that was meant as sarcasm.

That it was sarcastic was clear to me. The point you were trying to make with that sarcasm was not. (Note: I didn't downmod you.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com