My February 2nd posting Small Differences in Vista Can Break Applications drew a comment touting Java as "WORA (write once, run anywhere)" and disparaging Microsoft. I thought it was kind of ignorant, the sort of thing I heard from Amiga-philes 20-odd years ago, but I approved it anyway. My reply at the time was In my experience, Java WORA is in reality WOTE: write once, test everywhere. No development API My February 2nd posting Small Differences in Vista Can Break Applications drew a comment touting Java as “WORA (write once, run anywhere)” and disparaging Microsoft. I thought it was kind of ignorant, the sort of thing I heard from Amiga-philes 20-odd years ago, but I approved it anyway. My reply at the time was In my experience, Java WORA is in reality WOTE: write once, test everywhere. No development API is perfect or universal, I’m afraid.I have embraced and subsequently abandoned numerous programming environments that claimed that a single executable could run anywhere. UCSD Pascal and P-System was the first that I can still remember clearly. I thought portable Pascal was a great idea when I tried it around 1980, as I was then a Pascal fan doing mostly scientific and engineering programming. Alas, its performance on a PDP-11 was much worse than my usual combination of Fortran IV+ and Macro-11, and I was never able to get it to interface with the Industrial Control Subsystem of the PDP-11. It was essentially useless to me for real work.A few years later, when I was running a software publishing business that developed and marketed engineering software for microcomputers, I tried working with an engineering group in Israel. The professor who was the software architect of the group absolutely loved the P-System, since it was portable and had interpreters that ran on the Apple II and III, the TRS-80, and the IBM PC. When we tried selling the group’s heat exchanger rating codes in P-System form, they bombed. Our customers didn’t want to invest in the P-System. In addition, the mechanical engineering audience didn’t really embrace Pascal. Sales were much brisker when the group rewrote their codes in Microsoft Basic, because that came in the ROM of the TRS-80 and the IBM PC. Apple II users who wanted to run the codes could buy a Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard, and our customers were much more willing to invest in one of those than in the P-System.Why? The Z-80 SoftCard ran noticeably faster than the Apple II. The P-System ran noticeably slower than native 6502 code. It was that simple, at least for engineers. It was the difference between getting your answer in 20 minutes and getting it in 2 hours.The more things change… Software Development