

Best vs. Easiest Tool For The Job, or Why I Dislike Microsoft - eykanal
http://shadyacres.tumblr.com/post/61560297240/the-microsoft-tool-for-the-job

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sqqqrly
I have nothing against grandmothers, but I think of Windows as an OS designed
for grandmothers. Everything has to be 'easy enough for one's grandmother'.
There is nothing wrong with that. But I am, just a bit, beyond that level. I
find it cripplingly limiting.

Windows has become so simplified that it does nothing easily...unless all you
do is play solitaire and read web pages.

This is true of most MS applications. They are all project based. Two clicks
and you have a working project. It is great for a MS sales demo. But when you
have a real world task and it needs to move beyond a MS project
template....look out.

I much prefer process tools. They do very little for you. There are no two
click projects. You have to know what the process pieces do. The advantage is
that they will connect in an infinite number of ways but this requires
sufficient knowledge. The perfect example is the Linux command line (|).

An example: In the 90s I had a MS universal subscription that included
support. It was a great deal. I needed to create a web frontend to a database.
Two clicks...working. Nice. Then I noticed that data was stale. Newly inserted
data in the database did not appear in my application wo restarting it. I
could not figure it out. I called support. A MS engineer helped me. He was
great, an expert. It took him a _man-week_ to fix this!

I recently did something similar - a TCP server using Python and MySQL. It
took a little longer to get anything to work. But I did not need an 'expert'
to meet the last requirement.

