I grew up with windows & windows dev tools and I always had a pragmatic appreciation for them, but lately I became quite bitter and cold towards Windows and Windows developers and this happened long before I started using alternatives. At one point it was very hard to avoid the feeling that something, somewhere deep in windows is rotten. With every new windows version from winXP on, I had the feeling that I'm being sold a slightly improved technological improvisation with a slightly better theme applied on it. Visual Studio and .Net framework tried hard and nearly succeeded to hide the messy roots of the problem but the stench of thousands of leaky abstractions can still be felt every time you open one of the many doors leading to Windows basement. The C/C++ foundation of windows (the shaky ABI) is only making it worse and in my opinion many major problems of modern software can be traced to unsolved problems in C/C++. I have a dream (a delusion :D) that despite the accelerating patches applied to both(coincidence?) of these technologies (C89,99,11,1X C++98,03,11,17 Win Vista,7,8,8.1,9) they will both end in the greatest "oh, f*ck it!!" in the history of software and be abandoned for something much better, which I hope will crystallize out of these ~70 years of computer science.