[forgottenpaswrd]

"Is this the common wisdom these days? Experienced software developers who are good at C++/Qt can't learn themselves to use C#/.NET? They have to be trained? And that's impossible to do?"

1) Yes, common wisdom. 2) Experienced devs can learn anything if they want easily, what happens if they don't want to?. 3) Yes, a little 4) No is not.

It is more complex than than. Employees are people, and people are complex.

First there is a philosophical issue. The best c,c++, Qt programmers love Unix, and that's one of the reasons they work there. If you want to force them into Windows and .NET those people will take the door. It is not really difficult for them to find another job that needs c, c++ if they are great.

I know it sounds ridiculous from some mindsets who believe everything in life is money and he who pays is the master that could slave their serfs(suit's mentality) but geeks tend to be the more idealistic people I know.

Once the best programmers(best programmers could automate things and be more than 10x efficient than standard ones) are gone the entire system collapses.

[wwweston]

> Employees are people, and people are complex.

Except c/c++/Qt programmers -- they're pretty simple to predict, apparently.

The best devs I know tend to accept challenges to learn new systems and do well whatever they're working with, even if there's a particular language/platform they love more than others.

[deltasquared]

Some aspects of a platform are not a challenge, just painful.

For instance say I am looking for a bit of text.

In *nix I have vi in which I can type "esc/foo." Now, before I can blink the I am at the first match. Hitting "/" goes to the next one just as fast. If I don't know what file to look at, grep will tell me quickly.

Visual Studio has a search function, but it's not regular expressions by default, will not work on all of the design surfaces, and requires going through several dialogue windows. Typically I have to put my hand on the mouse to get any results.

For some tasks platforms and tools can make a big speed difference.

However it is true people are complex and hard to predict.

Perhaps some c/c++/QT programmers when given a, a shiny new windows based development environment, may enjoy the extra time they spend searching through source code. Who knows?

[rwallace]

Vim works fine on Windows.