"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

The Coming Breakage: Minimize Dependencies

Steve Loughran writes about old binaries running (or not) on the next version of the Windows OS...

Now, making old apps work bad may finally create incentive for people to upgrade their office suite, but it will also break every single IT-written win32 app out there. That's serious, and going to become and ongoing issue, I suspect.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. Don't write Win32 binaries. Code in Java, Python, Ruby, Squeak or other interpreted language, and trust the runtime to be signed by the time vista ships. You sneak past the security problem without having to go to any effort, and you avoid being at all dependent upon the OS and any more delays.

If you want to take advantage of some specific OS, framework, library, or whatever... why would you not code the independent 80% part, well, independently? Writing software to your advantage is always about minimizing unnecessary dependencies.

1 comment:

Florian said...

Yes, this is in essence the true meaning of OS agnostic. I've been one for quite a while now, and whenever I meet people who tell me that this or that operating system is so much better and helps them do stuff, I always am uninterested mostly, and ask if it runs python.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.