© 2008 Tim Finer
Software Technology Preferences
I've been a Windows application programmer for most of my professional programming life. When I started developing for Windows, it was back in the Windows 3.1 days and Charles Petozold's book was the resource for the topic.
I avidly learned whatever it was that was "hot". Several times, however, I got burned chasing the latest and greatest. Did that knowledge pay off? Not really. Most of that API knowledge is outdated and the operating system it applied to is no longer supported.
A few watershed moments led me to free as in freedom software. I ran into Windows NT 4.0 Workstation's artificial limit of 10 connected users. This was a big deal at the time and Microsoft claimed that Server was a substantially different OS. It turns out that Workstation and Server are the same OS but some registry keys. http://www.oreilly.com/news/differences_nt.html
I had started using OpenGL and had written some trivial apps in Direct3D. An immediate difference between the two was the quality of documentation. The OpenGL Red Book was and probably still is eminently more readable than any text for Direct3D.
A few more of these incidents later, and I started writing ANSI C++ code instead of MFC-ish C++. I learned STL and stopped using those ugly MFC collections. I installed Linux on a few boxen and really had fun again. I started using wxWindows (now wxWidgets), learned Python and I recently bought a Mac.
posted on February 11, 2008 at 10:21 p.m.
tags: favorites cplusplus python
© 2008 Tim Finer