Buzz Andersen

“What makes this all worse is that Win16 was never well-designed in the first place, and Win32 has replicated poor decisions in abundance. Win32 is a big API; it’s really huge, many thousands of API calls, and it’s totally inconsistent. It’s inconsistent in every way imaginable.“

(via Mareen)

As a longtime Mac developer I obviously appreciate the elegance of Cocoa programming, but, while I certainly did my time in the Java trenches, I don’t think I’m anywhere near as qualified to appreciate the virtues of Mac OS X programming as the veteran Windows programmer who wrote this article. He makes a good (and easily under-appreciated) point about how the historical consistency of design in Apple’s APIs makes them far easier to use than the confusing jumble of Win32 APIs. It’s almost always possible for a reasonably proficient engineer to tell at a glance exactly how a Cocoa programming interface will work, and there’s very little guesswork involved as to how things will behave (one can always assume by convention, for example, that returned objects are autoreleased). And don’t try to pin the problem on the age of Microsoft’s APIs either: Cocoa (as NeXTStep) has been around in some form since 1989!