NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On 11/26/05, Susan Shemin <susan_shemin at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hey, guys, nice to hear your responses.  However, there's always 2 sides to
> an argument, and I do not agree with you.  Somehow men think that only hard
> work is how things get done.  With women, they know it's finesse that works.
>  And I believe Visual Studio has finesse and class (sorry for the pun).

As a long-term resident of Seattle in the last decade, I remember
delivering several projects on the initial platform (then called
Visual InterDev 1.0 IIRC). My experiences on that platform were, that
as long as you stuck to commonly-needed functionality and standard
widgets, you were good to go. The second you deviate from the rest of
the herd, unfortunately, meant you would have to forego the comfy
controlled confines of the graphical environment and dig manually
through thousands and thousands of poorly formatted, generated code.

In short, it was excellent if you were developing the same exact appls
that everyone else was needing to develop. If you needed something
unique or uncommon you were at a great disadvantage, as the
development environment was not friendly to the do-it-yourself
approach.

My wife is the smartest person that I know, and she once explained the
difference of the environments (and their impact on me personally)
most succinctly:

"You know, back when you were on Microsoft stuff you spent the entire
day swearing at your computer. Now that you are back to open source
you spend the entire day swearing at yourself."

I have never heard a more profound observation of my work habits than
that one sentence, and it couldn't have been more correct.

With that in mind I suppose it is irrelevant what your gender is, but
more important who/what you want to be the cause of your
limitations/frustration at the end of the day. And I'd rather be mad
at myself for not figuring something out the first time, than be
trapped in an environment that I cannot fix.

-- Mitch