From: "Mark Lanett" <mlanett@meer.net>
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:32:48 +0800
To: <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net>
Subject: Re: Holloween II: Microsoft Plugs Linux
Message-ID: <003f01be092a$5ee1b800$692856cf@frohike.novita.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
>   By the standards of the ... developer accustomed to VB [Visual
>   Basic], these tools are incredibly primitive."

How strange! I just talked about that paragraph with a friend of mine and he
missed the EXACT same key words that you did. You LEFT OUT THE KEY WORDS!

The actual message said:

>By the standards of the novice / intermediate developer accustomed to
VB/VS/VC/VJ, these tools are incredibly
>primitive.

Which is completely correct. What I replied to the buddy:

Well they *are* [primitive]. You have to write a MAKEFILE for crying out
loud. You can't go from error messages to the source code / line in your
editor (unless you use Emacs). It's so stupid. Someone could write a simple
(scratch-itch) OSS IDE and dominate the market in no time.

The funny thing is that this was the DOS situation... MS hasn't been out of
"primitive" for that long itself.

Of course for experienced developers, GCC's 140 platforms (w/
cross-compiling) and optimizations and all is killer. But what's the ratio
of less experienced to sophisticated developers?

~mark