In windows, noone hears you scream

September 23, 2008 by
Filed under: Windows 

As you’ve all noticed, I’ve been working overtime with Windows as of late. I’m working in the embedded development industry, and wherever I turn, there is windows. To be honest, I don’t get this industry and why the hell they keep running in this environment. Most of the people I’ve met in the trade are brilliant minds and know what they are doing, but the business in general are very backwards refusing to let go of things.

Also, another reason for the entire trade being stuck in such a fashion is all the tools produced. You have a market catering to the same market with software and tools, developing for a single common development platform — Windows. And you have product lifetime to take into consideration…. There are still a bountiful of products out there that was developed before windows 3 was created.

All of this is creating a rather stagnant trade where it’s hard to get a move on, test new things, do something differently. Just take my last few weeks of working with subversion/trac/cruisecontrol on windows. Had I known just how much work I would be forced into just because someone else decided that we run it on Windows XP, I would have protested loudly.

I can’t simply get rid of this horrible abomination of an operating system in this trade, thats the sad but simple fact as of today. Sure, I’ve managed to get trac and cruisecontrol into the project, and we use subversion since before. But, I still need Windows for proprietary development environments, proprietary fileformats from customers, proprietary software from proprietary software companies, and so forth and so forth. And before you say anything, unfortunately I’m really stuck this time, proprietary IDE and compilers for weird hardware. Every time I touch an embedded project, it’s the same thing “oops, we gotta use this processor or that dohicky which requires software Y which requires Microsoft Windows”.

What’s just taken me 3 weeks in Windows — Basically, setting up subversion/svnsync/trac/cruisecontrol and some small work around that — was accomplished in that time, even though I did the same in less than 2 days just before in Linux. As we’re building for target via cruisecontrol, we where stuck with using Windows as the compilers where proprietary…

I’m a Unix person by soul, I love it, it’s natural to me, it’s my home. It’s where I come from! I feel like I’m screaming at this insanity asylum that is Windows, but nobody is listening to me. The entire Operating system is befuddled with incompetence, idiocy and bad design choices.

Tags:

Comments

2 Comments on In windows, noone hears you scream

  1. Bill on Tue, 23rd Sep 2008 19:00

    2. We produce our embedded development tools for Linux and Windows hosts. Our data shows that Windows over Linux is about 10:1 in our customer base. We still plan to support Linux as a host but you can see where the decision making process starts.

  2. Oskar Andreasson on Fri, 26th Sep 2008 23:11

    3. Bill, I’m definitely understanding why or how the decision is made. For most people, I can fully understand the general sentiment, but in general, I get a feeling that the entire business is kind of locked into itself. Kind of a “One player can’t switch unless all/most players switch” situation.

    Basically, I wrote this entry to get the monkey off my chest. For example, dealing with manual package management is just the stone ages and it’s giving me grey hairs at less than 30 :-).

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!

You must be logged in to post a comment.