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 "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don'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's not the point: they're solving something else. They're not spending effort making bug-free maintainable code, they've got more important things to do. They'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'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...