Tuesday, November 12, 2002

I've been trying to stay on top of the hype, rumours, and news being released about the 'next' version of Windows. Just when I think I am getting a handle on it all, this type of news announcement is made: Microsoft to skip Longhorn Server Release [Andrew Law's .NET Radio Weblog] 2:32:14 PM

Leaky Abstractions. Joel has written a great piece on software development abstractions and complexity. Ten years ago, we might have imagined that new programming paradigms would have made programming easier by now. Indeed, the abstractions we've created over the years do allow us to deal with new orders of complexity in software development that we didn't have to deal with ten or fifteen years ago, like GUI programming and network programming. And while these great tools, like modern OO forms-based languages, let us get a lot of work done incredibly quickly, suddenly one day we need to figure out a problem where the abstraction leaked, and it takes 2 weeks. And when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it's not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks. [The .NET Guy] 11:14:44 AM