4 ms·
Do you have a source on "vast majority of people ... believe backslashes are the way to go"? And if you do, do you have a source on why? Also, yeah, can anyon
by capote 11y ago
Do you have a source on "vast majority of people ... believe backslashes are the way to go"?
And if you do, do you have a source on why?
Also, yeah, can anyone clarify what the deal with the max path length is? And why it's possible to create a path above the max length but not to simply delete it from the filesystem?
- SBArbeit 11y agoProbably no source other than: there are 1B+ Windows users (like me) vs. maybe 100M Mac users + a few million Unix-y users.
- jdietrich 11y agoWhat proportion of Windows users actually deal with file paths on a regular basis?
- monochromatic 11y agoOut of people young enough to have missed everything prior to Windows 95, I'd bet that easily 90% have never typed a file path.
- jack9 11y agoAlmost every single working person who deals with URLs or buys things online...or uses facebook has typed a file path styled URL.
- jasonjei 11y agoGreat point. I think cross-platform developers have had enough special macro code for Windows path handling and parsing ;)
- jbergens 11y agoA lot of users open Explorer and looks at the path or copies the path. Nowdays the path is shown with arrows instead of slashes but when you klick on it to edit or copy it will use backslashes. This means a lot of users might have seen them and used them. Even 10% of 1B users is till 100 million users.
- jbergens 11y agoAnother problem is all Windows applications that don't handle forward slashes well. To make minimal inpact on the users all those applications would have to be updated. That will probably never happen.
- mehrdada 11y agoI bet most of those users use internet URLs with slashes more often than filesystem paths.
- Retra 11y agoWell, neither of "google.com" or "facebook.com" contains any slashes, so most people I know never type slashes in URLs.
- cowsandmilk 11y agoAnd how many of those 1B+ Windows users were present at the vote on backslash vs. forward slash? Honestly, 99.99999999% of people use one or the other because that was what the platform they are on used. Very few people were involved in the back vs. forward slash decision.
- brianmurphy 11y agoI'll take it a step farther. How many of those 1B+ people even know the difference between a slash and backslash. I hear people identify the characters incorrectly ALL the time.
- adrusi 11y agoMost windows users who know how the filesystem hierarchy works probably never see a file path. Windows explorer doesn't show the slashes, it shows some kind of graphical blocks by default. They do see slashes in their web browser though. Maybe they never look at those, but when they print a webpage, they see the url obnoxiously present at the bottom of the page.
- al2o3cr 11y agoFrom MSDN on MAX_PATH: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx#maxpath https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... I first encountered this issue when helping new developers get started with NPM on Windows; older NPM versions produced deeply-nested node_modules trees that could easily overflow the limit.