Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

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I guess a lot of the people here are too young to remember - but it's always been this way with Microsoft, and admittedly, with most other infrastructure companies out there (Sun had an era like that, NetScape did too). MFC, ATL, ADO, DAO, ...; Win8 might be breaking new ground in how "out of place" your app will be if you don't adopt the latest and greatest, but if you wanted nice modern menubars and toolbars ("Coolbar"), you had to switch from Win32 to MFC in the past. You had to go through hoops to get somethings done with COM without using ATL (with quite a few things working through ATL but not if you try to use COM directly; because no one in Microsoft ever tried to use them NOT through ATL).

And for a long time, it made everyone happy - because jumping on the new thing kept you employable, and actually shipping working products mattered less.

Microsoft did not change its ways. The world did.

True most young lads, have this notion that only Microsoft keeps changing the thechnology stack, when actually all companies do the same.

As anyone noticed how many MacOS X APIs have been deprecated since the early days?

Or the API changes in Android?

Every corporation plays this game, as you point out.

I still remember the early COM days, where the only API was C based, and COM was called OLE.

"Or the API changes in Android?" At least Google releases the support library to overcome that

Really?!

That is why you have to import android.support.* versus android.app. Which forces you to have some form of preprocessing in the Java code.

Plus the API for the action bar is still missing from the support library.

The support library allows you to use features of newer system releases on older systems. See also GDI+ for Win98/NT4 or Windows feature packs for example.

The API changing game is another problem - it does not allow you to use existing application with newer system. As far as I know, this does not happen on Android (for now).

There already a few deprecated API, which so far have not be removed, but until when?

Linux/Unix are just like this as well.

Except that the old widget sets never die. Xt, Athena, Motif, Lesstif, Tcl, gtk, Qt. Even swing and related tools if you include Java.

And so ... they're still in use. While significant new apps may not be getting developed with these tools, plenty of old ones are maintained, and the toolkits are largely serviceable -- they may be used if desired.

They actually provide a bit of useful visual feedback (if you're versed in Linux/Unix history), in that the style and design of an application gives you some idea of how it's going to work and what its quirks may be.

Consistency? We've heard of it.

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