Guy rants about MSIE6 and other stuff

From The Vision Thing

I know one of the things that's sucking my will to live: MSIE6 and other widely adopted piles of crap.

If it wasn't for IE6 (indeed, if there was no such thing as MSIE), web development of any kind would be an absolute pleasure. But it's all these people who insist on supporting IE6 that really piss me off. If you support a terribly broken browser, people will keep using that browser because they will have zero incentive to change.

For the web development part of our industry, we urgently need to stop supporting any browser that isn't at least as standards compliant as Firefox 2. We're spending insane amounts of time filling clean code with utter cruft just to handle the crap that Microsoft passes up for a web browser. Why? I know we geeks have a certain tendency to be masochists, our own worst enemies at times, but we're killing ourselves over a piece of shit that should have been consigned to history long ago.

I'm getting to the point where I just don't care that large corporates mandate the use of IE6, I just don't want to work for them. They can't pay me enough to sit through that kind of pain any more, I've got better things to do that don't suck my will to live.

But IE6 isn't the only example of this, I think practically every widely adopted framework out there today (Windows, Java, PHP, etc) all suck real hard. We're in 2008 for <insert pagan-based deity name of choice here> sake! Why are we still wasting time on boilerplate? Why are there still bugs in frameworks?

If people want something to focus on, make a programming language that doesn't suck cock.

Java: Full of ancient cruft and boilerplate Ruby: Pass me that enigma machine over there, I need to decypher the code Anything Windows based (ASP, .NET, etc): Please staple my kneecaps togheter

Why isn't there a programming language that's geared to getting problems solved? All of the languages out there seem to be purely focussed on providing us with endless coding challenges when what we really want to do is solve real-world problems.