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I just wrote a comment to an article I read on the Symbian Foundation blog: “Improving the developer experience“, by David Wood.

I think it’s worth replicating it here:

detronizator Says:
May 18, 2009 at 9:58 AM

@Mark Burton: I had EXACTLY the same experience. It was like jumping back to the “future” of software development and see that IT’S NOT MANDATORY to have to deal with ANCIENT C++ to write software for mobile.
More funny: it’s all based on Open Source/Open Standard technologies, like gdb and qemu!!!

@wtr1: Did you ever see Android running on the Emulator (because that’s what it is: WINSCW is a SIMULATOR)? And Symbian itself? I did when I was there. A guy started working on Symbian for QEMU, achieving to start th OS in a 10th of the time, if not less. Even faster than ANDROID to boot!!!
But at that time people took me as a fool for supporting this guy so strongly…
Seriously: WINSCW is “theoretically” faster but so badly written that it’s actually slower.

@David Wood: I basically agree with you, but to say that “there isn’t such a Symbian controlled by manufacturers”, it’s what I’ll call “more than just a personal and partial opinion”.
The control and the “steering” of THE manufacturer (who said “Nokia?”) was in every step that was taken in Symbian. And that was absolutely “correct”: after all Nokia owned the most of it.
Now you are “step by step” trying to change this. But the problems you are dealing today are heritage of a “not so far past”. And, as you said yourself, “it’s not going to change overnight”.

A last thought: I’m realizing that the most of those posts are focused on discussing the “technical philosophy”, “political moves”, “current market”, “business model” of Symbian but… are we ever actually going to discuss technical and more interesting stuff?
And, bear in mind, this is not a critic to the audience here, neither to the bloggers (who always arise good, important and interesting points): my critic is to make people realize that the problems of this Platform are so “deep in developers soul” and “frustrating for beeing so old complex”, that the main discuss driver is always away from the technical stuff.

For example: what about “common mistakes made by C++ developers and how symbian address and solve them” or “how to build a Client-Server architecture in 5 minutes” or “how to optimize performance of a UI-intensive application” or “how to generate JSON files in your web-based S60 app”… and I could say more.
Developers, at least of my age, want code, snippets, smart patterns and so on…

My 5 cents.

PS Please, bear in mind that WINSCW is a “SIMULATOR”, while QEMU is an “EMULATOR”, like the ARM one that Nokia preferred to QEMU… and we are still waiting here!
PPS At least this is the definition you can find on books from Tanenbaum or Sterling.