Platforms

I’ve been thinking a bit about the state of computing with regards to what programming languages and more generally what platform I should develop for. I’ve generally thought that ideally I could develop things that are platform indepedent. And to some extent I still think that is possible. But it seems a lot of programs that try to be platform independent suffer as a concequence and have difficulty competing with platform specific programs. I know that when looking for mac programs, I’ve almost always gone for native OS X apps. And when I was on Windows, basically all of my programs were windows apps. The only expections I can think of are Mozilla and JEdit. And then there is the idea that all future applications will be web-based or a least web accessible. But does this translate to platform independence. Potentially, but that depends on open standards and browser support on all platforms or in the case of web services, platform specific front-ends (browser or otherwise). Well the reason I’ve been thinking about this stuff is because of it could influence where I want to work. I want to work on project that have a future and will help me learn for the future.