Ed Burns's Blog

Article Thoughts - Dick Grimes's .NET Farewell

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/

I know I'm late to the party on this article, so please excuse my tardiness.

I'd like to offer my thoughts on how Microsoft and Sun have approached the problem of bringing more "ease of development" to their respective platforms. According to Mr. Grimes's article, Microsoft marketing was behind the introduction of VB.NET. Their motivation was to free the massive numbers of developers they had won with VB from the shackles of a single-threaded non-OO language, while still retaining those massive numbers firmly in the Microsoft development camp. Their approach to do this was marketing driven, and resulted in the creation of a backwards incompatible language, with an implementation of inconsistent quality, that is marketed as being backwards compatible with VB. Sun's motivation for "ease of development" was, "we have a great, powerful, easy to use, language, but damn, look at all those VB developers!" Sun's approach, rather than being marketing driven, was engineering driven. We chose to develop easy to use tools and technologies (like Java Studio Creator and DASL) and add selective, highly considered, features to the core language. I contend that right now Sun's approach has yielded a more successful result in terms of "ease of development", and it's starting to yield a good result in terms also of developer capture as well.

Comments

• eh? java isn't even backwards-compatible over minor releases. engineering driven my ass.

  Posted by: wbkw on March 09, 2005 at 04:30 AM

• AWT was definetly engineering driven. Just poorly engineered. Same with Swing, same reason SWT is gaining so much steam.

  Posted by: phlogistic on March 09, 2005 at 06:05 AM

• 
  wbkw> eh? java isn't even backwards-compatible over minor
  wbkw> releases. engineering driven my ass.

  
  Java 5 is certainly more backwards compatible with Java 1 than VB.NET is
  with VB, no?

  Posted by: edburns on March 09, 2005 at 07:33 AM

• Comptibility issues between Java versions are very very minor and cannot be contrasted with upgrading from VB6 to VB.Net, which requires a rewrite.

  VB.Net made absolutely no sense in the first place. MS should have continued VB6 and provided C# and the .Net framework as an alternative. You cannot dump on your largest developer base.

  This whole VB.Net mess reminds me of the "New Coke" disaster from the 80's. Customers were fine with Coke and didn't want "new coke" which tasted more like the competition (Pepsi). Soon customers were calling for old coke or "Coke Classic". Now VB6 developers are crying out for "Classic VB" as can be seen here at http://www.classicvb.org
  

  Posted by: rabbe on March 10, 2005 at 05:22 AM

• I really don't know what is driven behind Sun. "Ease of development"?, they are centuries behind Microsoft. "Engineering driven"?, that's debatable on what you mean by engineering driven. VB.NET is not meant to replace VB, they are completely two different technology. If you want to compare Java 5, then let's compare VB.NET 2 vs VB.NET, they are completely compatible. What about C#, it's a huge success. Programming language is one thing, technology is another. Java is good, but look at the technology Sun came up with it, most are harder to use vs Microsoft technology.

  Posted by: tuthach on March 10, 2005 at 07:06 AM

• I agree that Java is very engineering driven. Contrary to many of the posters here. The complaints about Swing is completely wrong. I think it is well engineered the problem is it is over engineered. I love it, and I don't think I would go to SWT, but it isn't easy to use for new people because of the power and flexability of it. I think lots of people don't necessarily have the skill to program in that kind of style and that is why the beg for the simplicity of VB. I think VB's problem is it has the whole make the easy problems easy, but you can't solve hard problems with it. Java doesn't make the easy problems as easy to solve, but the power of what you can solve with it is much more than the alternatives.

  Posted by: haskovec on March 10, 2005 at 08:18 AM

• haskovec - Swing is slow. Swing isn't native. Swing is a API "patch" to AWT. Swing doesn't come near the font support in Windows XP (et. al. OSs)...it looks OK on Windows 95 but the fonts are laughable eye candy in Swing / AWT on Windows XP. Good try, but I think it's time for Sun to admit defeat...we won't fault them, hey, you win some you lose some, we're still here for you Sun.

  Posted by: phlogistic on March 10, 2005 at 01:46 PM

• I have been a Java programmer (using mainly SWING) and because of a new project I switched to C# several months ago. I never was a big Microsoft fan and still I have not switched camps. My personal resume however is this: MS does make it "easier" for people developing fat client applications and, in general, approaching new APIs. They have it down and they beat Sun to the punch. Yet, as expected, MS fails when it comes to solving really complex problems. As soon as you delve into the depths of a MS API, you

  Posted by: norb on March 10, 2005 at 11:38 PM

• I have been a Java programmer (using mainly SWING) and because of a new project I switched to C# several months ago. I never was a big Microsoft fan and still I have not switched camps. My personal resume however is this: MS does make it "easier" for people developing fat client applications and, in general, approaching new APIs. They have it down and they beat Sun to the punch. Yet, as expected, MS fails when it comes to solving really complex problems. As soon as you delve into the depths of a MS API, you'll find yourself fighting for survival. MS makes the start easy, the initial approach. With Sun APIs, especially SWING, it's the reverse. Getting started is quite difficult, but once you grasped the underlying concept even the hard stuff becomes manageable -- though still not easy.

  My guess is this: If Sun manages to make SWING (and J2EE development as well) as easy as writing VB applications, they will survive and win against MS. If not, MS will sell seemingly "easy" tools, though people with a certain degree of insight will probably still hate all the hacks contained in MS software, Sun will eventually be beaten.

  I really hope that that will not happen, but I fear that Sun is a tad too elitist to simplify their stuff.

  Posted by: norb on March 10, 2005 at 11:39 PM

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