>The author has some interesting these to say about programmers and .Net. My guess is he likes Java. But in light of our recent discussions on .Net it might provide a little insight.
>
>http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars/1

I read it more that he likes the current Apple APIs such as Cocoa, than current Windows APIs which he claims are mired in 25 year old design decisions. He says Apple is cleaner/nicer because they took the time to basically rewrite from scratch (effectively by acquiring NeXTStep). That's true, but he doesn't mention that the price of that was breaking backwards compatibility, which led to some interesting times with major Apple ISVs like Adobe. It's my understanding that some major apps from these vendors are *still* not fully OS X compliant (i.e. Carbon instead of Cocoa).

I believe that if MS were willing to completely break backward compatibility in the same way, they could come up with an OS/API combo that most anyone would consider "clean" or "elegant". However, they would need to include a VM to run "classic" Win32/Win64 apps, the same way that OS X can run Apple Classic apps (well, mostly, anyways). Then, if you still support the VM, how do you encourage developers to write for the new APIs?

I'd be interested in getting this author's take on *n?x/*BSD APIs vs. Apple vs. Windows. The former have been around for a long time, but are they weighed down by ancient design decisions too? It's worth noting that OS X is based on BSD.