Comment by flarosa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flarosa | Hacker News Reader

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Microsoft used to be my hero, ever since the day I turned on my first TRS-80 and saw the Microsoft Basic copyright notice.

For 20 years Microsoft was my whole world. MS-DOS, old Windows, new Windows. DLLs, ODBC, IIS, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with Microsoft was a chore. I'd learn to program DLLs, and by the time I was good at it, they were pushing Active X. Or I'd learn to use named pipes, only to find that everyone was using sockets. Everything was a confusing mismash of competing APIs, old code, new code, multiple ways of doing the same thing with no good explanation. Finding help in MSDN was a nightmare. Sometimes they'd just repackage or rebrand the same technology for no other reason than to confuse you. DNA? What the hell was that?

One day my boss asked me to do a project in Java. What an eye-opener. Everything made sense. Everything I needed was there, but without tons of redundant, obsolete material. Today I run Linux servers, program in Java, deploy on JBoss with MySQL databases. I ditched Visual Studio in favor of Eclipse. I love working with this stuff. I feel truly sorry for people who are forced to limit themselves to Microsoft technology.

Java used to be my hero, ever since the day I learned it would manage memory for me, while still scaling to the heights demanded by the enterprise.

For 10 years, Java was my whole world. Servlets, old EJB, new EJB, JSP, JDBC, Spring, Hibernate, JSF, and all the rest of it. Keeping up with enterprise Java was a chore. I'd learn to program EJB 1 and by the time I finally figured it out, they were pushing EJB 2. Or I'd learn Entity Beans or Struts, only to find nobody was using it anymore. Everything was a confusing mismash of competing APIs, old code, new code, multiple, dogmatic ways of doing the same thing with no good explanation. Finding help with this J2EE crap was a nightmare. Somtimes they'd just repackage or rebrand the same technology for no good reason. Hibernate? EJB3? J2EE? JEE 5? WTF?

One day, in spite of my boss's mandate that we were strictly a Java shop, I started to rewrite a struggling project in Ruby on Rails. What an eye-opener. What took months and 5 people now took days and 1 person. Everything I needed was there, but without tons of redundant, repetitive lines of boilerplate code and XML -- and without endless compile-deploy-restart cycles.

Today I run Linux servers, program in Ruby, have abandoned JBoss, and use Apache and Mongrel with MySQL databases. I ditched Eclipse in favor of TextMate. I love working with this stuff. I feel truly sorry for people wo are forced to limit themselves to Java technology.

(Sorry for the too-obvious, too-easy parody. But I couldn't help myself -- it was the natural response to someone praising the virtues of Java during a discussion about a dying, irrelevant company.)

GUI text editors used to be my hero, ever since the first one I used that supported regular expression find and replace (dreamweaver's crap crap crappy editor, shudder).

For, heck I don't know, maybe two years, GUI text editors were my whole world. UltraEdit (needed it for reading EBCDIC data), JEdit, Eclipse, Komodo, Kate, GEdit, each with their uniquely useful featuresets.

One day I determined that I would run vim and vim only for all of my text-editing needs. Since that day roughly a year and a half ago I've developed some quadzillion immediate-throwaway macros via 'q1q@1', developed a .vimrc that follows me from machine to machine that I couldn't survive without, integrated into various little ruby scripts that I use.

I don't have the passion to do the parody right, but I figure while we're at it I'll push vim where I can. And I've pair coded for around a year on a RoR project where we've done all of the development in TextMate, so it's not like I don't have any TM experience :) ++| ft(m)w

I love working with this thing. I feel truly sorry for people who are limiting themselves to a single-mode text editor.

++| ft(m)w was supposed to read <ctrl+<shift+| ft(m)w

Not that that's any less dense

So what's next? Shall I make the same joke on you using Common Lisp and the the user named pg can then pull up Arc...?

Yes. That's how this industry works: everything closed, expensive, and exclusive inexorably becomes open, cheap or even free, and inclusive.

IT. MIS. Automation. It's the only career whose objective is to make yourself obsolete.

Awesome.

Didnt Paul Allen write most of the Basic Interpreter rather than Gates? I think he should be your hero.

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