Building for the 99% Developers
In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with.<p>Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those &quot;99% developers&quot;. The ones who don&#x27;t read HN, the ones who don&#x27;t code for fun. Everyone for whom coding is something that gets in the way of their real objective.<p>No wonder they produced bad code! But that&#x27;s not the point: they&#x27;re solving something else. They&#x27;re not spending effort making bug-free maintainable code, they&#x27;ve got more important things to do. They&#x27;re doing the accounting for their small company, point of sale for the shops in their city, all the kind of things that may not be glamorous but that&#x27;s all around us (for better or for worse)<p>So while I puttered around in my self-congratulatory ivory tower of unix, Microsoft understood what the real world needed, for the 99% of developers...