Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!pollux.usc.edu!papa
From: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Programming MS-Windows vs. Amiga (Re: resource tracking)
Message-ID: <23157@usc.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 90 18:30:55 GMT
References: <1165@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca> <5214@sugar.hackercorp.com> <23118@usc.edu> <5219@sugar.hackercorp.com>
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In article <5219@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>MS Windows is widely
>regarded as an incredibly hard environment to program in 

I'll get flamed for this, but here it goes. I've done both.  I found MS-Windows
at least 10 times easier to program than the Amiga. And there are a variety 
of reasons for this, but four of them really come to mind:

1. avaliability of working dialog/gadget/widget editors. This cuts down
   user interface design and implementation by at least a factor of 10.
   [please don't tell me that power windows is a good interface editor.
   it's not.]

2. Resources. This cuts down compilation times by a factor of 2 at least on
   a large project (no reason to recompile, just re-link).

3. 99% of the MS-Windows calls use "internal" data structures that you
  cannot poke at directly. This is compared to the Amiga system in which
  practically everything is "public", even things that shouldn't be (remember
  all those IntuitionBase fields that were supposed to be private?).  This
  results in less run-time crashes than on the Amiga.  I think this was a real
  win for MS-Windows and I wish the Amiga was designed similarly.  We would
  have less "hacks" and more stable and crash-free programs.

>(I just saw a joke
>on the net: "What's bigger than Hello World in X?" "Hello World in Microsoft
>Windows!"). 

Well, Hello World in X with the Toolkit is about 10 lines of code and data.
Try to do the same with the Amiga and take a look at the result.  Note that
the hello World program must accept any font on the command line, any color
for background/foreground, center the text vertically and horizontally,
and continue to do so at any window resize.  I doubt that you could do it
in 10 lines (or even 30 lines for that matter) on the Amiga.  

Note. I am not trying to put down the Amiga.  BUT, there are positive and
negative things in everything.

-- Marco
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