RD

First off, thanks for responding, I have to say I was a bit surprised to see that you had taken the time to read, and react to my post. For my part, I probably get into a bit of a spiral when I respond to what I see as an anti-MS philosophy and it doesn’t really help me get my point across well. As a programmer, knowing the amount of support I have gotten from Microsoft, and the free tools they have made available, I tend to get touchy. I also have my issues with the Open Source movement (specifically around Java) in that I believe that there are “right tools” for the “right jobs” and that it doesn’t fit every model and can be counter-productive.

You should know that I have felt (though never put into words) about modern science (quantum physics in particular) exactly the way you portray it in your book. The notion that once again we find ourselves absolutely sure that things are as we say they are, and damned be the person who dare challenge that. It is truly a strange thing when something as observable as gravity can be described mathematically only by using a magic number (big G), things like that make me doubt everything scientific around me.

Your book came to me as I was finishing John Archibald Wheeler’s book and a biography of Einstein, trying to find insight into the men who put us in our current quantum-predicament. In the end, much of the book was entertaining and insightful…it just got political/religious on me, and I suppose that is where my disappointment came in.

Either way, thank you again for responding. I’m probably going to end up picking up some of your other work, out of sheer curiosity, and I’ve already told me friend to go out and buy Rapture for the Geeks (because even if its ok to let him read mine under the EULA, I think people should support you monetarily for your hard work).

-Matt

I’ll take any structural complaints to heart, but I took great pains at several junctures in Rapture For The Geeks to explain how I am NOT a computer expert and am in fact a rank amateur programmer. “Python complaining about my inferior coding skills . . .” etc. See especially the acknowledgments, where I thanked the members of the Python community for introducing me to computer programming. I fail to see where I would come off as somebody who wrote an OS. You wrote your first program at age 11; I wrote my first computer program at age 51, and I was an English major in undergrad, so it would be silly of me to pretend I’m a computer scientist. I think you bring too much technical knowledge to Rapture For The Geeks. The audience I had in mind was the heavy to moderate computer USER, who has never given much thought to where our relationship with computers may take us as a civilization. I am first and foremost a humanist concerned about what technology is doing to us or could do to us (see, e.g., my third novel, Brain Storm). I’m eminently qualified to write about those concerns.

All of that said, I really enjoyed reading your other insights. And I’m glad that you liked the first half. Neal Stephenson also takes pains to point out how Microsoft is responsible for bringing computing (PCs) to the masses, so you are in good company there. I still can’t abide their authentication schemes and their criminal behavior when it comes to antitrust, a matter of public record, and a tired cliche to you, but not to most users who never think about it and don’t care. Even much of this screed was tongue-in-cheek.

Thanks for writing.

RD

I’ve been programming since I was 11 (that would be 25 years), and can code in more languages than I care to count. (I’m no superman, but it bears worthy of mention before I continue).

Microsoft didn’t try to tax or patent or take over ANY languages. Indeed it CREATED Visual Basic for rapid prototyping BEFORE the concept even existed. It also has and continues to provide FREE compilers for various languages on its platform (to include C++ I might add, and the newer .Net languages).

What they did was provide the platform, standardize it and bring it to the masses. Beyond that they turn server rooms around the world from Gazillion Dollar Sun Racks into 3rd party server racks (cheap, and easily upgraded) with a legitimate networking OS on them.

Can you recall a time when Commodore and Be existed, or when the very first GUIs showed up on the PC? There were so many competitors, and yet MS won out. I was a bit sad, I happened to think that OS2 was the way to go, but it happened. What followed was the ENTIRETY of the boom in consulting/programming for the next 10-15 years.

It went from being a tongue-in-cheek commentary on technology, to a neo-garage-coder anti-Microsoft screed. There was a point in the second to last chapter where I almost put the book down and stopped reading on principle. Had the book been sub-titled “Why Microsoft Sucks” at least I would have known what I was getting into.

Further, I found a great deal of the indictment of Microsoft to stem from an obvious novice to the world of programming.

You talk of “real” programming languages and only include languages that are either script or require a JIT or VM to work. Where’s the real OOP languages? If you want to discuss the follies of bad programming, you need to be informed. (write me an e-mail and I’ll explain to you how Java is the worst thing to happen to programming since LOGO).

You talk about standards and formats that will exist in the future and use ASCII as the example. At the VERY least, as a *linux user you should have talked about UNICODE, and if really concerned XML.

Look, it may seem like I’m picking nits, but you’re trying to come off as someone trying to save people from the Singularity (welcome to 15 years ago), and you end up sounding like you think you wrote an OS after you completed your first web page. I don’t mean, to come off like this is an ad-hominem attack on you, but I just found the whole thing lacking.

Perhaps, looking back, there should have been two books. The first half or so was truly good, and truly thoughtful. The way you speared science its holiest members was fantastic, and something I could really relate to. The end where you just tried to shred Microsoft because you couldn’t read a Word 1.0 file from a floppy disk in 2008…well…I just didn’t get it.