Quote Originally Posted by yereverluvinuncleber View Post
I'd agree with that. They are all dedicated developers and almost by nature they distrust anyone trying to manage, promote or market their concept. Stepping into that team with a shiny suit and holding a clipboard is akin to suicide. You can just look here at this forum to see an analogue of a similar developer grouping.

Whether they meant to create this or not, the primary aim of ReactOS at the moment is to create developers that want to learn how to build, analyse, document and investigate Windows itself, creating competent Windows o/s level developers.

As a training tool it serves this purpose. This doesn't help potential users directly but it is a real life use.

Being positive about it, it is growing fast in the number of contributors and the low level interest it garners. If you want to 'use' it then you have lower your expectations.

Being even more positive, if I look back at the o/s and development scene ten years ago I could not imagine how close we'd be to a VB6 or Windows replacement. Both seemed an unrealistic desire.

Amazingly, both are making serious progress.
I think all of us are going to be in for a huge surprise when it comes to knowledge and effort intense grunt work related to works like ReactOS and keeping VB6 alive. I'd advise you guys to start paying attention to AIs like ChatGPT. People need to start taking AIs very seriously, especially programmers.

While I don't think they will replace programmers, I do 100% believe what it means to be a programmer will drastically change in the next few years. Being a programmer in the near future will mean only needing to understand the jargon and how things work conceptually so we will know exactly how to talk to AIs when we tell them the kind of programs to build for us.

90% of the reason efforts to keep VB6 alive is still being enthusiastically supported because of the number of large code bases out there in VB6 that are just too cumbersome to port. When AI makes it more widely feasible to reduces a year of work to a mere week, I believe that will kill all these efforts. Why maintain a large VB6 code base when you can have an AI rebuild a modern version of your application using whatever the latest development platform is in just a couple days.

The driving forces behind projects like ReactOS I believe would be affected in similar ways by the advancement of AIs.

I thought us "old school" programmers had more time, but I've been paying close attention to the current AI revolution and now firmly believe we have about 5 years left if so much, before our way of doing things is basically dead. Programmers of the near future won't care about learning how to actually code or inner workings of operating systems. Instead they would be learning how to write AI prompts.

I'm both sad and happy about this at the same time. Sad because now every out there script kiddie would be able to produce works of similar quality to those of an experienced programmer today. It will saturate the market. I'm happy because the massive productivity boost AI will usher in will now make it possible for programmers with big ideas to do it by themselves. It will allow some of us loners to compete with big houses that have the resources to run big teams of developers.