Response Chain
Windows 3.1 Passes
A sampling of letters from the developer community.
Microsoft last month stopped licensing Windows 3.x, which had continued to linger as an embedded OS. One developer offers his thoughts.
At the time Windows 3.1 was king, I was working in the first version of Paradox for Windows, converting about 300 databases for a power company in Wisconsin with a small team of developers.
From a stability standpoint, Paradox for Windows 1.0 with Windows 3.x was a pretty stable pair. Paradox for Windows Paradox Application Language (PAL) was a fully object-oriented language built from the ground up, and was probably my greatest frustration. It used inheritance way too much, causing this to bubble up through the methods, which was hard on debugging problems in finding the exact point of the error.
That being said, the language was also very elegant, providing capabilities like dynamic form creation and dynamic query construction.
I was predominantly a Borland Software language practitioner for Windows development until the release of Microsoft C++ 5.0. At that time, I started transitioning into Microsoft language implementations. I also did some C-based development, and that was considerably more problematic and difficult on Windows 3.1.
Toward the end of that conversion effort, the beta of Windows 95 came out. I started working full time on Windows 95 beta 3 and remember that it wasn't entirely stable. But the user interface was so much more interesting and had so much more detail in system interaction and information that I just put up with the challenges.
Looking back now, the 16-bit Windows was very simple by today's standards, and I wonder if maybe that was the original appeal.
Darryl Jewett
Systems Architect,
Connection Strategies Enterprises Inc.
Milwaukee, Wis.