My graduation project was porting my supervisor thesis of a particle engine originally developed on a NeXT Cube in Objective-C/OpenGL into Windows/MFC/OpenGL, because it was clear it was going nowhere (OS X wasn't yet announced).
So I actually lived through those events, and also think most modern environments fail short of what desktop computing could have been, and in a twisted way Windows is the closest of them all with COM and .NET, yet the whole WinDev vs DevDiv politics messed even that one, most likely beyond repair in the presence of current UI stack chaos.
Thanks for commenting. I've been reading your posts for quite some time and I enjoy your commentary about how Windows, from a developer's point of view, is the closest living thing we have to the types of Smalltalk and Lisp environments people at Xerox PARC and other places enjoyed in the 1980s and early 1990s. Windows has the infrastructure to make a truly great operating system; I've been reading a lot more about the .NET ecosystem this year, including multi-language interoperability through the Common Language Infrastructure and PowerShell scripting. What's unfortunate about Windows are the ads, the telemetry, the aggressive attempts to make people use Edge, and the strange UI choices that Microsoft made starting with Windows 8 (and, arguably, since Windows XP's Luna interface). I think of Windows as a gem that's unfortunately encrusted with layers of dirt.
Another project I pay periodic attention to is ReactOS. If ReactOS matures to the point it can run on modern hardware and can run modern Windows software, then I'd make ReactOS my daily driver. A daily driver version of ReactOS combined with .NET would make quite a compelling platform for me.
I fully agree. When you know what to take from Windows, it's a great OS. The hackability of the UI with AHK is way above what Gnome or even KDE can offer.
Yet in a funny way, when I explain to seasoned Linux hackers that my OS of choice is Windows, they look at me in a funny way :)
So I actually lived through those events, and also think most modern environments fail short of what desktop computing could have been, and in a twisted way Windows is the closest of them all with COM and .NET, yet the whole WinDev vs DevDiv politics messed even that one, most likely beyond repair in the presence of current UI stack chaos.