Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremiep | Hacker News Reader

The whole Windows ecosystem is a huge mess for developers right now.

Visual Studio 2012 often crashes, the API documentation is often incomplete and not helpful, there are quite a number of incompatibilities between W8 and WP8, XAML has mediocre performance on ARM and can't be accessed from C++ on WP8, the list goes on and on.

If anything, Microsoft managed to make most Windows developers I know want to work on linux/Android or OSX/iOS instead - the rest are blissfully unaware of what UNIX is in the first place.

Sure these things may improve over time, but right now developers are nothing more than beta testers. For us, the possible profits are not worth the efforts to deal with the mediocre development experience.

View on HN

Of all of the problems I have with Windows development, Visual Studio is the least of them. I think 2012 is pretty darn good as far as IDEs go.

Vs2012 crashes less than vs2010 though. Hand over your cash now for the new feature!

We've bailed and moving to java on the server and web and android apps for mobile.

VS2012 for Windows Phone development is free: http://aka.ms/winphone8sdk

You still have to pay for it if you want extension support.

I used to write Java on the server-side and hated it. It felt like mindlessly writing boilerplate code for a living with a language assuming I'm an idiot who can't be trusted with more than one paradigm at a time.

The last backend application I wrote was entirely written in CoffeeScript running on node.js. While it doesn't get the performance of the JVM, the development experience has been some of the most fun I've had in years.

For future backend projects, especially if they're big in scale, I'm looking at either Haskell or the D programming language.

Java on the server is fine if you know how not to poke your eyes out with context reloading and avoid jsp and jsf like the plague :)

I find coffeescript/node.js to be a bit too trendy to trust and Haskell to be perl for computer scientists.

If I had my way, I'd write everything in RPL

"a bit too trendy to trust"

I imagine java was trendy also when everything was written in C++

Back then, Sun had to spend a fortune to push Java down the throats of developers. Mostly by selling it to their clueless managers instead.

Java was born out of a trend and still lives as one to this day, good thing only the corporate world really bought into it!

The reason its so popular with corporates is that most of the expensive problems are already solved so building software is sticking a few well proven components together with some glue. It's also good at managing memory for you, which is not something that can be said for most languages.

When java turned up, we were all still writing c. C++ was still fairly unstable then. Microsoft's compiler was actually probably the best on the market and it was still a hunk of shit to the point that most people just did win32+c. On UNIX it was always C.

I'd rather avoid Java itself like the plague :)

The JVM may be great, but the language itself is mediocre at best!

Maybe if it someday gets type inference, removes the null pointer (and therefore the stupid NullPointerException in "memory safe" code), adds lambda expressions, adds compile-time function evaluation, doesn't try to wrap everything inside a class and a few more improvements especially to limit the god-awful verbosity, I might give it a try again - but by then we'd call it Lisp.

The D language has completely replaced C/C++/Java/C# for me, it's not as portable yet but it's getting there.

You should give Haskell a try, I don't use it much yet but merely understanding concepts such as monads, type classes and applicative functors have completely changed my perspective on software development. It's just like learning Lisp; it's enlightening to say the least.

The language is simple, which is its main virtue. Problems are easy to solve and communicate. Most problems are already solved as well which is how you spend less time writing code and more time delivering functionality (or taking holidays).

Agree with type inference, but null pointers are fine (if you know what you are doing and use commons.lang validator). Don't really need lambda, but its coming anyway. Compile time evaluation - no thanks. Verbosity is solved with tooling.

I'm proficient with common lisp and scheme (ive even built my own scheme vm) and I'd rather use java over either to be honest because it is so hard to get anywhere with lisp variants and the only ide worth mentioning (slime/emacs) is unreliable and clunky. It's a ghetto.

I spent 2 months trying to build something in Haskell. Its fine for data processing tasks, math and comp Sci focussed stuff but for productive every day use, its a pain in the arse. It's also write only.

Enlightenment for me was discovering and writing a forth interpreter and compiler. Then discovering RPL on the HP48 series of calculators. Before that it was BBC BASIC (not to be confused with mere BASIC) and ARM assembly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com