[ Updated on June 26, 2025 ]
I am a retired programmer. I did that work, along with a fair amount of IT work, for about 25 years for a regional bank, a multi-state insurance company, a global information services company, and finally a non-profit ranching organization; and, all of it was stressful work. It may not be surprising to learn that for almost 7 years after my retirement I could not stomach to think about, or even look at, software code. I could barely bring myself to fix my home computers. It was as if I’d developed a severe mental allergy to programming.
In retrospect, it seems to me the chief reason for my negative feelings was the realization that so many technology companies had made false marketing promises, regarding the quality, consistency, support, and longevity of their software engineering tools, which I felt bordered on deception. The technology companies, providing the software tools, wanted profits, too much, and overreached on what they could reasonably and reliably provide. It was what I call the Jules Verne syndrome: if they conceived a certain technology, then they thought they could quickly realize it, too. But, that happens less than business owners and their marketing departments want us to believe. As Verne knew, it is a lot easier to write about a fantastical thing than to actually create it.
The programming languages and tools of the time were more complicated than they were sophisticated. They marketed a toolbox for software developers, but the tools in that toolbox were very primitive. It was hard to implement almost any project without delays and compromises. Imagine trying to build the Eiffel Tower with only sticks and stones. Computer Science consists of vast labyrinthian fields of knowledge, and some of them hardly seem related to the others in any way. Technology companies need to sift through the complexity, the hypothetical, and the hype in order to design and build a solid and lasting software engineering tool. Most attempts are failures and only a few succeed. With that in mind, why do these companies continually plague the public with tools and technologies that are clearly, even to themselves, substandard. Gullible developers and business leaders buy into, or are forced to use, software and systems that were failures at design-time, long before they were deployed. Why can’t technology companies make sure their products are well-designed, stable, completely tested, and fully documented before their release? Why do they repeatedly sell products to developers and business that they, themselves, know won’t work, and won’t be needed in 3 years. Many of these companies have made fortunes by selling nothing more than prototypes!
I came across a post on LinkedIn the other day, quoting Marshall Goldsmith’s old book: “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” The post used Goldsmith’s title in a sentence to make the point, made many times before, that innovation [or to my thinking, the illusion of innovation] is always needed by companies in order to achieve progress and future success. But, I was in an ironic-sarcastic frame of mind while reading that, so I immediately translated the thought to: “What failed then is going to fail again.” In other words, “What Got You Here [to failure] Won’t Get You There [to success, or even to parity].
As I consider the industry’s past array of horrible mutating software development tools, almost all of them seemed like they were created (because of their poor design, coding, testing and documentation) to serve, in part, as a cruel psychology experiment to see how software developers would react to their tools failing almost everyday. Even fully released software development products were in fact prototypes, infested with bugs and design blunders. We, all to easily, believed the hype, hoping that the software tools being sold to us would actually get us “there.” They rarely did, and never without the steepest learning curve (although “punishment curve” would be a more accurate term). We were looking for a stable, understandable programming environment designed for developers, while the software development and tool vendors, instead, wanted profits and software that would hide its own inadequacies.
So, being gullible, I bought into one of those schemes, years ago, called, “Silverlight.” It was similar to JavaFX or Java Applets, but for the early .NET Core environment. It was a good idea at the time, giving small applications mobility. But, as the project developed, I discovered that Silverlight was a half-baked environment. Many necessary features were poorly implemented, or always slated to be implemented in future releases, or poorly documented; there was a herd of problems, work-arounds, and obstacles instead of simple, standard working code. Silverlight was an example of a software development environment that could have been successful, but was rushed to market (instead of giving it two years more work to transform it from a toy into a real tool). Eventually, all of Silverlight was deprecated (with the same being true of Java Applets). I intended to move the project to WPF (what a nightmare!), but that project fully fell apart when a new company director was hired; and, 3 months later he moved the entire organization to a different state.
With time on my hands, I turned my attention to something new called, “Xamarin.” But being a little less gullible, I took a fair amount of time to research it and test it. My conclusion was that it, too, was a prototype product– full of both possibilities and problems. I decided to wait it out to see if Xamarin would be deprecated like Silverlight, or would survive to become something better.
So, that brings us to autumn 2024, when I finally shook off my “allergy” to programming and got interested in how programming had changed during the past 7 years. I knew that AI was being incorporated into IDEs and DevOps tools, and I heard that .NET had at last reached a high degree of stability. I was pleased to see that Xamarin had survived, being re-baptized “.NET MAUI.” Luckily, I had built a new computer in 2024 to replace my 8 year-old dying Dell. I like running lots of VMs, so my new build would be perfect for trying out .NET and .NET MAUI, too. I quickly realized that a lot had changed in the past 7 years within the closed borders of programming; there were many new ideas, patterns, terms, tools, frameworks, platforms and services; but, perhaps the greatest change was the arrival of AI in useful integrable forms.
Since my plan was to research aspects of both .NET and .NET MAUI, in early 2025 I decided to take all my family’s old Apple junk to the Apple Store for a sizable credit toward a Mac Mini M4 computer. That way, with my Android phone, spare iPad, and a few other odds and ends, I was able to piece together (by watching and re-watching YouTube videos) an environment suitable for developing .NET MAUI apps (for Windows, Android, iOS, and Mac Catalyst (iOS for macOS), as well for developing most other .NET software, too. So, with that setup I am ready to start exploring this brave new 2025 world of programming. Hopefully, it will be a lot less frustrating than in past times, and I hope I will be using more complete and merciful tools, rather than those prototype tools (reminiscent of the sadistic psychology experiment, mentioned above).
Yes, I am excited about learning new things, but I am equally interested to know if technology companies, in 2025, have redeemed themselves from the predatory marketing tactics used during the dark ages of programming a few years ago, and if there are now, in 2025, tools good enough to allow developers time to think about their projects and really understand the underlying software engineering concepts, rather than frantically toiling away in confusion each day; and if, in 2025, it’s possible to work without having to suffer prototype IDEs and tools. That’s what I’m interest in knowing. That is why I’ve created this Code Harbor website: to record what I will be learning about programming, including my projects, and my research into the frameworks, platforms and other computer science topics which interest me. This is Code Harbor’s principle purpose.
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