I have been writing less than usual and developing software more than usual. I thought I’d given up writing software about 10 years ago, and I was wrong. Times change and the Internet, in a dirty little alliance with Open Source Software, has changed everything. I now think I need to write software a lot more. Actually, there’s a philosophical point here - the real age of self-publishing is upon us and I’m beginning to believe that every writer needs to be able to build and manage their own website, at the very least. In fact, it’s becoming “de rigueur”, so I think developing your own software makes even more sense.

The truth is that it’s never been that hard and it is getting easier as long as you avoid the stupidities. One of the stupidities is PHP. Mostly the IT industry makes poor choices in computer languages and it pulled it off in a really major way with PHP, which sits happily at the top of the LAMP stack. PHP is the revenge of the geeks. The It industry has always had geeks and when building software suddenly started to get easy, the geeks moved in and strangled it. PHP is their latest victory; designed by geeks to deter rational people from any attempt at web site coding.

Luckily there’s Ruby and Ruby on Rails, which compensate. Ruby was created in Japan where the local geeks hadn’t yet realized they were at war with the rest of humanity (shame on them.)

Mac Dev

Ruby, by the way, is well supported on the Mac - actually the more I get to understand the Mac environment the more impressed I am. Quite a lot of things are well supported on the Mac. I should have emigrated from Windows at least 2 years before I did.

I’ve noted, every now and then, that change in this industry takes a while and I was just contemplating this fact last night while reading a book on Mac programming.

When it comes to software development the Mac is so far ahead of Windows that you need an astrophysicist to calculate the distance.

And it was all achieved long ago when Steve Jobs set up NeXT Computer. His team handcuffed its necessary quota of geeks and created the development environment to die for. They took wagon loads of sensible decisions; from using Objective C for development through to imposing standards at various key points in the development process.

OS X is the realization of that line of software evolution - the old Apple environment was just the launching pad. But see how long it has taken for this to gain traction. More than a decade. Slowly, very slowly, a software ecosystem has built up around the Mac. And look what’s happening now - there’s almost a stampede to the Mac.

Ultimately the point is this: The Mac is a coherent environment and Windows is not.

Microsoft believes that it can fight back in some way with Windows 7, and pouring millions into an advertising campaign, but it’s pretty much over for Windows in the consumer market. It really doesn’t matter what Windows 7 is, it’s not going to make any difference in the consumer market (it may do in the corporation - but even there Microsoft is in difficulties, because the Mac is already through the door.)

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