What I hate about the developers is that they live in their tiny little closed source Windows cave. They develop so many cool things but you can probably never use most of it outside of DF. Like how many cool games would we have if the world generator would be an open source C library? How many languages would have been added by other people who actually study language related science if they knew how to. How many people would have developed 3D graphics engines and usable mouse+keyboard menus if there would have been a publicly defined interface to interact with DF.
There are actually many cool tools but as far as I know a lot of the time of these developers is drained by having to find out about the API themselves (which might change) and most of them are naturally only working on Windows as well.
Think of Minecraft style community + DF on all available operating systems. How cool would that be.
Whilst I agree that cross-platform is a nice goal, I'd much rather developers wrote what they want to, and are more comfortable with first and foremost without having to think about multiple platforms or 'trendy' languages, etc.
I want developers to write the things they want, and I'll be happy if they share them, rather than writing things they think everyone else wants and not having the same passion.
Some people will want to write multi-platform something and have the passion for that, which is great, but I wouldn't ever want to enforce that on any one.
If you ever want to see a developer cave, just look at Linux (and the oft-used 'Windows people can build it themselves if they can work it out')
Disclaimer: I use all OSes and like them all in different ways. However, when I write software for myself, there's little chance I'm caring about who else will run it. It's coding for pleasure, not money.
Edit: I should also mention how utterly AWESOME Dwarf Fortress is.
The "just write this one program" philosophy always just yields one program at most. The "add software to the community" approach might add only 1/10th of a program, but with thousand people doing it you get 100 programs out of it. Which approach looks more reasonable?
Or to give another example how many people can enjoy Game of Thrones because it's written in English? (I'm German and I love it!) If it would have been written in a minority language that is only spoken in one village somewhere in central Asia it might have been more comfortable for the developer, but only few people can ever take joy in it.
They don't need to make the program work on all systems or use a fancy new language. They just need to enable the community and make use of development patterns that are flexible. Java certainly is not a fancy new language, and despite it's claim it only really works on Windows well enough out of the box. Yet Minecraft has an open community where even the developers profit from what others add to the game. When the coders of DF die in an airplane crash tomorrow DF is pretty much dead as well and that's the big problem I think. If I invest my whole life to create an awesome piece of work, then it should surpass me in number of years.
Going along with your analogy, it's very possible that if this central Asian George R. R. Martin was deterred from writing Game of Thrones in his native language because it isn't "reasonable" for others to expect to read his works, then maybe it would never have come into existence in the first place.
Look, I understand your point but sometimes when you want something done you don't mess around and care about what other people want. You just do it in whatever way is easiest for you. Saying you "hate" these people who actually have CREATED these things that have added value to people's existence seems really rather immature. It's not like lives are going to be saved because DF was open sourced.
> When the coders of DF die in an airplane crash tomorrow DF is pretty much dead as well and that's the big problem I think. If I invest my whole life to create an awesome piece of work, then it should surpass me in number of years.
What reason do you have for your belief that the community's development of DF (after the plane crash) will be according to the founder's great vision? I openly say that it's perhaps better if in this case the further development of DF is ceased than developed into a direction that is opposed to the original developer's goals.
There are actually many cool tools but as far as I know a lot of the time of these developers is drained by having to find out about the API themselves (which might change) and most of them are naturally only working on Windows as well.
Think of Minecraft style community + DF on all available operating systems. How cool would that be.