De-Ballmerization and Microsoft is oozing delicious developer love. What the hell happened. It's like Skeletor became He-Mans best buddy all of a sudden and started helping everyone.
I'm thrilled. The MS tooling is really, really good and the only thing stopping me from committing to the stack fully has been it's lack of open sourceness (vendor lock in is still feasible but getting less of an issue).
Edit: Pardon the fanboyism but I've tried a set of feasible Non-MS language options for my particular domain and F# in Visual Studio beats for me, my particular use case and coding style Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Python, Haskell, "browser technologies"...
Unfortunately, Ballmer's managerial approach is what killed it. He might have known that helping developers was the way to go, but he also thought that competition in the organization would lead to better performance. My understanding is that this idea failed in some of the most vicious and destructive ways possible. I hope that the very visible failure of his cut-throat management style and setting up so many disincentives to cooperation in the organization is highly recognized in management-theory circles. It turns out making your company a terrible place to work with everyone at each others throats isn't a good idea. Whodathunkit?
When it comes to propaganda from large and powerful entities, usually it help to reverse the meaning to really understand the message.
"Developers,developers,developer" = Fuck developers,need more profits next quarter.
"We brought peace and democracy to country <X>" = We seriously fucked it up for years to come, and installed a brutal puppet dictator.
"We are not evil like those other mean companies. We will do good in the world" = The main products are the users, who's information it sells it its real users. Have colaborated and been in bed with corrupt governments all across the world.
The list goes on. It is a rather fun heuristic. And once you know about, you'll start seeing it more often.
It's not only from organizations and powerful entities, I like to apply this logic in normal day-to-day communications with people too.
If someone has a very strong opinion about something and tries to "convert" everyone to it (say, vegetarianism, meditation, emacs, or whatever), it is usually because someone is very insecure about him/herself this trait, and made it part of their identity. It usually has no point discussing this with a person like that.
> When it comes to propaganda from large and powerful entities, usually it help to reverse the meaning to really understand the message.
This works very well for advertisements.
e.g. "Our flights are very comfortable" -> Long haul flights are, in general, cramped and gruelling.
"Our broadband is fast" -> Broadband isn't fast enough.
The selling point of the product addresses a perceived deficiency in the product category. It's safe to assume that the product is, at best, slightly less bad at it than the competitors.
Except I don't think this is true of Ballmer when it came to "developers, developers, developers". I doubt Microsoft has willingly done anything to harm developers that use its products, certainly not for "profits next quarter". Sure, they deprecated some technologies (like Silverlight), but that was in response to market realities (like the iPhone and HTML5), and even then they are supported for years. All the various complaints lodged against Microsoft, such as Spolsky's "fire and motion", are more rationally explained by the vagaries of how technologies progress organically in large companies and in the industry in general.
That culture he instilled has been going on for enough time for him to realize that maybe it is time to reverse or change the policy. If he cared enough, they would have been looking and doing something about it.
Now as you say, would that have made the difference? It is hard to say...
The "new" Microsoft is supposed to be "cloud first" and "mobile first". Yet Azure has among the most lowest uptimes and Microsoft is dead-last in mobile. So you may be on to something there!
Ballmer set Microsoft on this course years ago. This is his legacy. Billions in the bank probably make up for lack of credit from the peanut gallery who think radical shifts in direction happen overnight.
He laid the foundation before he and Gates started selling their stock. The new Microsoft is beholden to Wall Street. It can't do an Xbox360 or Windows Phone or buy a Nokia. Ten years of Open Source projects at Microsoft are why analysts aren't calling for scalps. Ballmer made the next guys job easier.
Depends on how you look at it. Microsoft has been good to developers since the Gates area. They always understood the importance of developers for their OS, as long as you pay for the privilege.
The biggest difference now is all the stuff they give out for free.
> The biggest difference now is all the stuff they give out for free.
No, it doesn't actually matter, it's not a financial issue. Open sourcing their libs is good because it gives developers access to the sources of libraries which they use daily. This in turn will make debugging much easier and will also help with understanding what is actually happening when you call some function.
I left MS-land a decade ago, but when I worked with MS tools I'd have gladly paid serious money for access to the source code (that was in C++, I hear debugging is easier in C#), but that wasn't an option. Now they offer access to the source code, which is the important part, and for free, which is kind of nice but very important.
In this instance: Desktop, graphics. This from a hobby point of view, though! Which means I have very little time to achieve anything and occasionally don't touch the code in weeks. I've come to write code that is a) trifty b) readable c) works on compile d) leverages type system for composable code that has a specific "correct" way to do things.
So I can return to my code, which I've completely forgotten how it works, see that it compiles, read it through, and continue working. Noticeably: I do not need to care about the tooling because it just works. I don't get a shiteload of weird exceptions when I run my code (looking at you, Clojure - yes, I'm a noob) and since the Pythonic and mutable nature of F# allows me to write code in the way I enjoy the most it feels like a glove. There are a few oddities occasionally and some bits are a bit more verbose than in other languages (Clojures collections spoil any other language) but the overall experience is that I can focus only on my code. For me, it's a pain free computational substrate, and free as in beer now that Visual Studio community edition is out.
My progress is really slow but always worthwhile.
If you are interested I found Jon Harrops "Visual F# 2010 for Technical Computing" really good practical introduction, Don Syme et. alls "Expert F#" a good reference book on writing general stuff in the .Net ecosystem with F#, Petricek's "Real-World Functional Programming" a very good introduction to various application patterns and Sestoft's "Programming Language Concepts" a great book and online reference on writing interpreters and compilers (http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/plc/).
I'd recommend the recently released F# Deep Dives as well - it's less about learning the language, than about seeing how a variety of different real world problems can be solved in F#. A few hours reading that gave me more inspiration than all the blog posts solving toy problems I've read in the last year.
Your opinions of Clojure seem to mirror mine. I absolutely love the simplicity of the syntax, and after having learned a bit of Clojure then coming to F# I released it's syntax for describing data collections had forever ruined me. EDN is fantastic.
Unfortunately I have to love Clojure from afar. Partly because I only touch it for Riemann so I'm always rusty, and partly because the JVM. I'm really hoping that all this open source .NET business will bring more attention to ClojureCLR though. ClojureScript is a wonderful thing and I know there are some F# and CIL->JS transpilers but LightTable->ClojureScript->Chrome is a wonderful thing. A similar story, complete with insta-repl, with F# would be crazy cool.
You could also check out Kotlin. It's not as strongly functional as F# is but is still pretty nice, sort of a better C# for the JVM. For desktop stuff, JavaFX works OK.
That said, I'm glad MSFT is now competing in the open source/x-platform desktop app space. The Java team can use the extra competition.
I'm thrilled. The MS tooling is really, really good and the only thing stopping me from committing to the stack fully has been it's lack of open sourceness (vendor lock in is still feasible but getting less of an issue).
Edit: Pardon the fanboyism but I've tried a set of feasible Non-MS language options for my particular domain and F# in Visual Studio beats for me, my particular use case and coding style Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Python, Haskell, "browser technologies"...