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by augustl 1960 days ago
It seems to me that if you compare Apple and Microsoft, it's only the latter that cares deeply about the developer experience on their platform.

https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
3 comments
redwall_hp 1960 days ago
It's really weird adjusting to a post-Ballmer Microsoft. I have plenty of existing loathing for that company from their behavior towards Netscape and Linux in the 90s and early 2000s (among other, smaller players). However, their developer-focused offerings are amazing, now that they made .NET Core open. C# is great to work with.

Meanwhile, Apple is now engaging in anticompetitive behavior that I find frustrating. (App Store stuff.) Things have turned on their head.

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taylodl 1960 days ago
That's been mostly true since both of the company's founding (Microsoft in 1975 and Apple's in 1976). What was Microsoft's first product? Basic. Microsoft's Basic ran on the most popular home computer platforms of the day (except Apple's). Even Commodore's Basic was fully interoperable with Microsoft's.

What was Apple's first product? A computer. A computer meant for people not having a CS background. The Apple II kicked off the home computing revolution, i.e. bringing computing to the masses. The Mac was the computer "for the rest of us" and was aimed squarely at graphic artists, desktop publishers, musicians, and the like.

So yes, Microsoft has always been developer and business focused whereas Apple has always been the computer "for the rest of us."

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jasomill 1959 days ago
Pedantically, while it's true that the Apple II originally shipped with Steve Wozniak's Integer BASIC interpreter, a Microsoft BASIC implementation, Applesoft BASIC, was licensed soon after the II's release and replaced Integer BASIC in ROM on the II+ and all future models.

Also, to be fair to "graphic artists ... and the like", one of the reasons the Mac platform remained popular among graphics arts professionals through the '90s was that system-level inter-application scripting, added to the platform in 1993, was well-supported by both Apple and third-party application vendors, whereas analogous cross-application scripting in Windows was mostly limited to Microsoft Office products.

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zests 1960 days ago
It's a shame that the windows experience is so poor that it negates any positives introduced by the developer experience improvements.
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