Alan Cooper writes about the "...chuckleheaded Windows API" in the March issue of Visual Studio Magazine. He says it was "The worst tool by far... a tangled mess of ugly system calls."

All weekend I've been scouring through Petzold, a book that requires its own sherpa. Excellent book (just like everyone says) on a simply awful topic. By page 50 he had explained what was going on with the L thing in front of my strings, why the intellisense is wrong for my calls, the _T stuff, basically everything that I was imitating and wondered why it worked.

Much has been written about Alan Cooper and I won't use this format to chime in broad scale. The point that is salient to bring up is that every programmer has a comfort zone. Just because a technology is outside of your comfort zone, doesn't mean it's badly designed or broken or wrong. With that said, it's perfectly OK to stand up for comfort, and what you believe is comfortable. It's perfectly OK to treat these beliefs as truths because you have to have something to go on, and often the technology hasn't conformed to ANYONE's comfort zone, so it might as well be yours. After all, Alan Cooper was the one to stand up and say that the File menu should be abolished. Now, that's letting them have it right from your own kitchen.

As a user interface designer I fought tooth and nail for user's rights to have the product meld as closely as possible to their expectations. As a programmer I would never dream of making those same demands of my tools. So I have to program using native Windows API calls and carry around a book with its own zip code? Hey, it's like choosing to be a mechanic and not wanting to have a bunch of tools lying around. In short, I don't see being a programmer as the same as being a user. As programmers, we don't have the same rights to elegance and ESP from the designers of the technology we use. Well, maybe 10% of the "elegance" expectation that a regular user should have upon installing, say AOL.

comment []12:10:49 PM