New API of the week

Hey! Enki has moved his blog to Armyofevilrobots.com. Check it out after you are done here. This page is going nowhere though...

So I finally broke down and installed visual studio on my XP box. I have to admit it, this is a pretty slick IDE. I always had trouble with coding on Linux because the documentation was often behind the actual libraries. While I could (and often did) read the code itself to get a handle on how to use it, the Visual Studio IDE is so damn slick that it makes everything on Linux look pretty crude.

For my first foray into VS coding, I downloaded the WindowsMedia Player (hereafter referred to as WIMP) SDK, and built a media player application. While I have no illusions about the fact that Microsoft actually did all of the work, while I just had to glue some file selector boxes together, it was still pretty cool to get a media player together using WIMP and other standard .NET libraries, in less than an hour. This included the time I needed to learn the API.

To any Linux developpers that are listening... IT IS ALL ABOUT THE TOOLS! GCC and GDB are great tools, but we need better interfaces for Linux coders. Python/Java/C++ RAD tools with syntax completion, and automatic linker (no writing makefiles or autoconf files) handling would be a great start. Most MS coders don't have a clue about Makefile handling, and guess what.... they don't have to. We get our panties in a knot when a GUI has a slightly ambiguous dialog box, but you have to understand cryptic macro languages to use development tools? Come on!

We need to try harder. While Linux gets a huge number of fantastically talented hackers due to it's powerful (if cryptic) dev tools, we need to have easier, and hopefully stupid proof tools, so that we can steal the other 95 percent of coders away from Microsoft. While I hate to say it, we need these people. Somebody has to write the accounting system tax handlers, or data mining apps, or other mundane but less challenging stuff. I want to get other people doing it so that I can keep doing the cool stuff, like writing GCC cross compiled embedded fuel injection control packages, or 3d motion simulation, or whatever.

Mull it over.