It’s also funny to think of companies like Apple, MS, etc. as having 1 opinion or even tactic.
I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other.
From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either.
And rewriting software in a new language is always going to get back burnered by delivering new features. Until there’s a fundamental change they want that justifies a rewrite, a codebase is staying in its current language due to inertia.
Heck, companies will lie to themselves about these things. My favorite is this pattern
Execs: We’re all going to X!
Crowd: Yaaay. [Some project leads look at each other with a mix of sarcasm and fear.]
Initiative kicks off. Swag is distributed. Projects are identified.
Exec: [Looks at $] Well, except this one. And that one… Ok, we’ll replace all of these [waves arms] in 3-5 years.
Narrator: 3-5 years continues to be relative to the current date.
To be fair, the developers at Microsoft went to town on it as well, adopting C# for parts of Windows Blackcomb, including the File Manager, the Desktop Manager, and (some of) WinFS. It turned into a fiasco and the .NET adoption was mostly dropped, as far as I remember, when they did the "reset" and pivoted to Vista.
Because the WinDev team sabotaged, the effort, instead of doing an Android or ChromeOS with everyone roaming into the same managed direction, they made sure they pretty Windows APIs would win..
So since Vista all new APIs follow Longhorn ideas, while using COM, followed by Windows Runtime, with the caveat that tooling is just as bad as before .NET was invented, but hey they are happy fellows on their little turf.
I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other.
From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either.
And rewriting software in a new language is always going to get back burnered by delivering new features. Until there’s a fundamental change they want that justifies a rewrite, a codebase is staying in its current language due to inertia.
Heck, companies will lie to themselves about these things. My favorite is this pattern
Execs: We’re all going to X!
Crowd: Yaaay. [Some project leads look at each other with a mix of sarcasm and fear.]
Initiative kicks off. Swag is distributed. Projects are identified.
Exec: [Looks at $] Well, except this one. And that one… Ok, we’ll replace all of these [waves arms] in 3-5 years.
Narrator: 3-5 years continues to be relative to the current date.