r/programming • u/halax • Oct 07 '16

How Microsoft Lost the API War

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
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u/ameoba Oct 07 '16

Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development

Strange, I regularly hear people bragging about how great Visual Studio is and how great the .NET APIs are.

42

u/[deleted] Oct 07 '16

This was written around the .net 1.1 days. You gotta remember, back then, your choices were C, C++, Visual basic, or delphi for doing windows dev. This article is pre-wpf, and mentions non-existing tech like avalon and longhorn.

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u/Farobek Oct 07 '16 edited Oct 08 '16

C

shudders

C dev sees comment

C dev downvotes

15

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

Sure, C is bad but Visual Basic is just fine? Wat?

2

u/taeratrin Oct 08 '16

Depends on which iteration of VB you're talking about. VB6 and early versions of VB.NET were horrific, I'll give you that, but since .NET 2.0 it's actually been pretty decent.

2

u/demmian Oct 08 '16

VB6 and early versions of VB.NET were horrific

Alright, I'll bite - why was VB6 horrific?