This time I'm going to talk about operating systems. I think the operating system situation has gotten completely out of hand. Every one of them seems to be competing at being the worst it can be. I'm still using Windows, but only because the people writing OS/X, Linux, *BSD, etc., seem to be doing everything in their power to make them even less attractive than Windows, so I can't reasonably switch to anything else, no matter how much I'd love to.
Let's start with the fact that I'm a developer. Every operating system seems to be intent on making itself as hostile to developers as humanly possible. The new stuff in Windows 8 is (almost?) all COM based, and COM is one of those things pretty much guaranteed to make any developer with even a shred of self respect and/or sanity wretch uncontrollably every time he gets close to it. Think of the people who refuse to drink some particular liquor because of the time in college (or whenever) that they got horribly drunk on it, and then even more horribly hung over, and have never touched it since.
Well, COM is pretty much like that, except you don't even get that one night of having a little fun acting stupid first. COM is just a horrible hangover that starts from the first time you see it, and apparently won't ever go away! To make it worse, not only is COM itself badly designed, but virtually everything Microsoft does with COM seems to be even worse. You end up with a full page of code to do what should have taken one simple function call. Basing all that's shiny and new in Windows 8 around COM has to be just about the most colossally stupid blunder yet, from a company that seems to have adopted the military attitude toward blunders ("we must plan with exquisite care to ensure against any minor problems getting in the way of committing the most massive blunder in human history.")
"Okay", you say, "why don't you just switch to OS/X?" The answer is simple: in its own, entirely different way (yes, we all know, "different is good" -- but not this time) Apple has done even worse. Microsoft makes you deal with COM -- but Apple makes you deal with Objective-C. If COM is the hangover that never goes away, Objective C is the nightmare that never ends. Where COM is all very "real" and far to nitty-gritty, Objective-C has a bit of a surreal feeling (at least to me). Every time I write anything for MacOS, I get a little of that nightmarish "I just can't believe this" feeling. The problem is that in a nightmare, you eventually wake up, but with OS/X and Objective C, you get your face rubbed in the fact that yes, it really and truly is this badly messed up. The infuriating part is that they come close enough to doing things right that it seems like it must almost be an intentional bait and switch.
Well, perhaps Linux would really be the way to go. In a lot of ways, this *should* be the best choice. Unfortunately, for at least some of what I do, I wrote OpenGL code. On Linux, pretty much the only choice there is Mesa3D. The Mesa project has done some pretty amazing things, and accomplished a lot. Despite that, Mesa3D basically only implements OpenGL 2.1, and I really want support for OpenGL 4. Unfortunately, the gap from 2.1 to 4 is big enough that I can't very well just look the other way, or make do with what it provides.
If OpenGL was the only problem, I could probably manage to live with it, but that's a long ways from reality. Any programmer who's been around for more than a week or two knows about the holy wars between advocates of vi and advocates of emacs that have been going on since "eight megs and constantly swapping" was intended to refer to a simply massive amount of memory, rather than so little that modern script kiddies think "well, of course with only eight megs you couldn't hope to do anything!" In any case, having used both I'm fully prepared to say this: they're both right. Vi and emacs are both awful. The world would clearly be a lot better place if neither of these horrible pieces of garbage had ever been invented.
Now, for any non-programmer who might happen upon this (hunh? Why would a non-programmer read this?) I'll point out that programmers aren't merely religious about text editors. Many people who consider themselves religious might only go to church once or twice a week. Even people who devote their lives to religion rarely pray (or meditate, etc.) for more than 8 or 10 hours a day. A typical programmer spends about 16-18 hours per average day with his text editor (and may easily go 30 hours straight at times). Worse, unlike religious people, programmers absolutely demand immediate, tangible results from that time.
In short, a programmer who doesn't like the editor (or IDE) he's forced to use, is likely to become a bit like some crazed middle-ages crusader, starting to hate life, and trying to make everybody around him do the same. While there are alternatives to Vi and emacs available for Linux, most seem to be in about the same position as I'm dealing with right now about operating systems. They all suck so badly that everybody sticks with what they know, because everything else is too horrible to even contemplate.
Oh, before I leave off on Linux I should add a bit of a rant on one more thing: the other tool that programmers are stuck with using at times is a debugger. Pretty nearly the only debugger available for Linux is gdb. This horrendous piece of garbage is the one thing that can make the editors and IDEs available for Linux almost seem bearable. Yes, they're awful, but it's many times worse. Consider this: back in the early 1980's I did some programming on a Control Data mainframe, mostly using Fortran (and when I could, Pascal). This was roughly three decades ago, on hardware that was pretty much obsolete even then, using an operating system that was mostly a relic from at least a couple of decades before. Even so, its debugger was still better than gdb. It was bad (bordering on awful), but gdb is even worse. This particularly rankles because there were at least reasons for most of the shortcoming in Control Data's debugger -- but gdb doesn't have to fit (along with the program being debugged) into a machine with less than a megabyte of RAM, or somehow protect itself from the target program without benefit of hardware memory protection.
So, that takes us pretty much back to where we started. Much like with editors/IDEs, I find the very notion of continuing to deal with COM loathsome and horrible -- but all the alternatives seem to be even (quite a bit) worse. I'm still left wondering, though, why it is that everybody involved seems so intent on doing the job so badly. At least as far as I can see, Microsoft came to dominance by being the one company that did just a mediocre job instead of a truly awful one, but nowadays they seem to be doing things just as badly as everybody else. If just one OS could rise to the level of just being mediocre, I'm pretty sure every programmer around would flock to it, because even mediocre would be so many times better than the messes we deal with now.
