i'm not cut out for software pundit-dom.
Joel Spolsky posted a great article the other day -- he's pretty hit or miss but this one is full of great insights. Whether or not he makes it to his overarching point, the trip is worthwhile.
Joel talks about the agony of desktop development: Microsoft has an army of developers creating new APIs; there's no way any of us can keep up unless we read Dr. Dobb's all day. But is that anything new? Consultants have been on top of the latest article-ware for years -- perfect to recommend for your next doomed business integration project! -- while the important programmers carry on using whatever tools they know well.
Joel talked about web apps vs. desktop apps. We all know why web apps suck. The web is a suck-tastic app platform. Occasionally someone gets it right, or at least "as right as can be expected". Bloglines is a pretty good example of that (Karen still prefers a desktop client, but she's wrong. You want your RSS reader inside your tab-enabled web browser, and you probably don't want your RSS info to live on any one machine, and the Bloglines interface is good enough to make it worth the tradeoff.)
I love good desktop apps. Adobe makes some. My first experience with Vegas a few weeks ago was awesome. Mozilla is a great desktop app. As I've said before, IDEA rocks. XEmacs, SplashID, SecureCRT, Excel (yeah, that's right), Palm Desktop... I like all of these tools.
But wait a second -- almost every application in that list runs on multiple platforms. Maybe Microsoft's API-du-jour isn't necessarily all that relevant to quality desktop development?
I have no point here, folks. eBay changes 30,000 lines of Java every week. How do they do that?
Right, time to wrap it up. Here's a quote from the Scott Collins interview that was linked all over the web a few days ago. The interview is a great read and for some reason, I love this:
I'm more of a niche programmer, but I've always respected the people change everything with conceptually simple pieces of software. Love it.
Wait, I'm still not done. Let's close with this quote from the footer at wordpress.org: