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Comment by ceronman | Hacker News Reader

Cross platform developers tools by Microsoft! Great news! MS has some of the best developer tools out there. In my opinion, the only downside has been the dependency on the Windows platform. As a developer, I feel much more comfortable in a Unix environment.

This move was unthinkable a decade ago. I'm very glad to see MS moving in this direction. Just because of this announcement I want to start playing with TypeScript and C# again.

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This move was very thinkable a decade ago. Even two decades. In fact, a good example from 1995:

From Wikipedia: The strategy and phrase "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when the vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified[8] that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguis...

Even when Microsoft 'Embraced and Extended' Java, it was only on the Windows platform. It was not cross-platform. The whole point of that methodology wasn't to make sure that everyone was using Microsoft-flavoured Java, but to make sure that everyone was using Microsoft-flavoured Java on the Microsoft Windows platform.

    It was not cross-platform

Cross-platform didn't mean much in 1995. Which other platform was there at the time? Apple was dead in the water. Red Hat had just come into existence. Netscape Navigator 1.0 had just shipped in December 1994.

Arguably windows didn't have the hold it does now in 1995... in 1995, DR-DOS/Desqview and other UIs were prominent, and OS/2 was more popular as a desktop than Linux has ever been (as a ratio), not sure about OSX today. That also doesn't count Apple's penetration at the time which really wasn't as insignificant as you make it out to be.

A lot of that changed starting with Windows 95. Though, it's really 1998 that MS practices in terms of embrace/extend/extinguish was at their top.

I finished my school in 1993. None of the computer science teaching was on PC. I have used mainly sun but also HP, next and VAX computers. PC were only used for word and excel.

The school was lending special network card for the few pupils (less than 10 among 400) who had linux on their PC. The common network card (we had network plug in our rooms) was not supported by linux.

Even if linux was not mainstream, Cross-platform had already a meaning at that time and djgpp was well known to run programs on dos (for example caml-light, the ancestor of ocaml).

The fact that Java was device-agnostic due to the JVM is something that Microsoft viewed as a threat. Bill Gates saw Netscape as a threat with their plugin system because of the idea that the OS would just be a shell to the browser which would run programs via plugins. This one of the reasons that they wanted to destroy the Internet. They feared that it would make Windows irrelevant.

"Write once, run everywhere" is a threat to a company whose entire business model is based on "everywhere" being owned by them.

Marc Andreessen probably stoked Microsoft's paranoia when he said "[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers"[1]

1. http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_andreessen/2/

I'm not sure what the reference to Netscape Navigator is supposed to mean, but I find interesting that 2.02 (released in 1996) was available on all these platforms:

> Windows3.1 > Windows95/NT > Macintosh > BSD > Linux > SunOS > Solaris > HP-UX > OSF/1 > Irix > AIX > OS/2 > OpenVMS VAX > OpenVMS Alpha

In 1995, commercial Unix was still a viable platform in the enterprise market (and Java has always had strong connections to the enterprise market).

> Apple was dead in the water.

That's very much debatable. As a particular counterpoint, Apple hardware had a pretty significant market share among educational deployments. There were quite a few schools that were Mac-only even as late as the early/mid 2000s, let alone in the 90's.

Now granted, a big reason why that changed was because all the homes and businesses used Windows (or some specialized Unix like Solaris or IRIX), so the education market eventually shifted to the Windows world, but that happened quite a bit after the 90's.

Everybody talked about thin clients and Java as an OS at that time, there was a massive Java hype going. The things Microsoft struck preempively against largely never materialized thanks to super-crappy broadband (if it even existed) and lousy early Java performance (there are dozens of Java office suites, browsers etc that never got traction or was canned before release thanks to general unmarketability).

It seems Microsoft has influenced JavaScript/ES v6 with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. Given the vast TypeScript code based that MS wrote for SharePoint 365, Visual Studio Online/Code, etc. it seems more than logical. But, read on:

  BRENDAN [Eich (JavaScript creator)]: Again, TypeScript is 
  smart because it’s embracing and extending. Let’s hope 
  Microsoft doesn’t try to extinguish. That’s the third E.

  JAMISON:  [Laughs]

  BRENDAN:  I don’t think they will. I think they actually 
  bought into JavaScript at some level. And I’ve talked to 
  people like Anders Hejlsberg about this.

But Brendan Eich answered to my thread by replying to a parent:

  ES6 and the Harmony agenda influenced TypeScript. Where 
  TS went its own way on things like open modules, MS has 
  promised to track the Ecma standard versions ASAP.
  In particular, TS classes were purely an extension to 
  ES6's design, while ES6 was not frozen. There was not 
  feedback the other way, at least not phrased in terms of 
  TS -- the MS folks on TC39 had to make more generalized 
  arguments for changing the draft ES6 spec.

Maybe after more people know about Visual Studio Code some others share the "German angst" about their common business tactics a bit too. I would prefer if they don't turn JavaScript into C# Trojan horse style. Hopefully things have changed since Satya Nadella took over.

You can read the full thread there, it's just 3 days old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442011

The quote:

  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
  And those who can are condemned to see others repeat it.

comes to mind when I see the enthusiasm in this thread. The top comment itself seems like a blind praise one would hear in a cult.

The one thing that annoys me most as I grow older (and, hopefully wiser) is the loss of this enthusiasm you mention.

I think i should have used "Excitement" instead. On your point, my enthusiasm grown with the more I learn as I see more potential that I would not have given my previous lack of knowledge.

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