I've been working professionally with Microsoft platforms since the early 2000s.
Not sure why you celebrate that Microsoft is treating everything but the latest as legacy.
His point is that after massive rework for OS X, more than 10 years ago, expertise in Cocoa has been remarkably stable and portable across their ecosystem.
Microsoft in the same time, has been through how many data access layers? How many networking/HTTP APIs? Web frameworks? GUI toolkits? All of it legacy abandonware now.
It's not free to have to continually retool to work with APIs that will still get bugs fixed.
Yes, using the 1998 API will still work. But that API will never be worked on again. Good luck if it has a bug that means something is impossible to do.
Microsoft errs on the side of throwing something out there before it's fully baked, and fixing it by introducing replacement APIs with the learnings from the first couple.
Apple's approach is to keep APIs private up until such time as they're ready to make them public, after which they commit to them and they'll be The Way To Do Things for a much longer time.
Which you prefer I guess depends on the type of developer you are.
That's a Win32 API call added for Windows 8.1 to their 1988 API!!!
As for bugs, you've never read "The Old New Thing" blog or played with the compatibility options for running executables in windows? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/
They actually go as far as fixing all the bugs and backporting the actual bugs to older compatibility layers so software that relies on the bugs still functions properly when you set the compatibility OS version.
Regarding impossibility, there is literally nothing that I can't do with their APIs. Find something and I will show you.
Win32 is the only API that can be used in the long run and is maintained and improved by MS.
All the other APIs like WinForms, WPF, MFC, Silverlight, WinRT get abandoned after a few years. Yes, they still run but you end up with a codebase that uses outdated tools without a good migration path to a never API.
It would be really nice if they would actually stick to something.
Not sure why you celebrate that Microsoft is treating everything but the latest as legacy.
His point is that after massive rework for OS X, more than 10 years ago, expertise in Cocoa has been remarkably stable and portable across their ecosystem.
Microsoft in the same time, has been through how many data access layers? How many networking/HTTP APIs? Web frameworks? GUI toolkits? All of it legacy abandonware now.
It's not free to have to continually retool to work with APIs that will still get bugs fixed.
Yes, using the 1998 API will still work. But that API will never be worked on again. Good luck if it has a bug that means something is impossible to do.
Microsoft errs on the side of throwing something out there before it's fully baked, and fixing it by introducing replacement APIs with the learnings from the first couple.
Apple's approach is to keep APIs private up until such time as they're ready to make them public, after which they commit to them and they'll be The Way To Do Things for a much longer time.
Which you prefer I guess depends on the type of developer you are.