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The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
- b1gFanOfVMS 10y agoI can only imagine the hate this guys going to get here for NT...but I'm a huge fan. One of mt first jobs was running a VMS cluster...then went on to work with Windows. Enjoyed it all. Dave Cutler is brilliant. Thanks Dave!
- kidmenot 10y agoHe's a great engineer and, together with his equally great team, he designed what turned out to be a great kernel powering countless machines around the world. There is very little to hate about the actual NT kernel. Kudos to Dave, instead.
- hga 10y agoCore NT is, or at least was, prior to NT 4 putting graphics in the kernel, very very nice. It's mostly what Microsoft did on top of it, and their general stewardship of it that I have a problem with. For the latter, I noticed a serious drop in quality starting with 3.51 SP2, which to the best of my ability on Google seems to have come out 9 months before NT 4.
- cm3 10y agoExactly. Windows 8 and 10 include substantial improvements to the underpinnings that would be worth the switch from Windows 7 if Microsoft didn't basically kill the UI. This stupid desire to change stuff for a new version, as done with cars, does nobody good. - 3D widgets serve a purpose and make it much easier to see what's a widget and what's not - Windows XP theme engine was great and it got killed in Windows 7 - Windows XP and Windows 2000 UI was to the point and didn't waste screen real estate like 7, 8, 10 do as well as current OS X and GNOME or KDE. First we complained open source desktops had no designers, now we should curse the day we wished for designers to get involved. - all Windows tools and subsystems got much better and featureful and there's new filesystems and subsystems, but you cannot take the core and slap on a different desktop environment like you can with Unixes. Back in the day you could use a different Windows Shell, but I don't know if that's still possible. I have this suspicion that Cutler has a private build of Windows on his machine which still has Classic UI, but the product managers would never allow that to get published, or else they would be wrong to have killed it off in the first place. This constant desire to change the UI is unbelievable and hard to explain. Imagine if new knives would follow the same mantra. Many things work best the way they are with no need to change, and if change is wanted, something like Windows XP's theme engine is more than sufficient.
- oldsj 10y agoHaving switched to windows 10 after using OSX and Linux primarily for the past 10 years or so, I have to say its been fine for me. The UI is simple: hit the windows key and type the name of the program you want to launch. Switch virtual desktops with ctrl+win left/right. Snap windows to the left or right with win+left/right. And now, its actually usable for dev with the subsystem for linux feature. Oh and by the way games just work, chrome just works, spotify just works, intellij just works and all of this can be installed from the cli with chocolatey.
- cm3 10y agoYeah, like I said, many things have been improved, but they come with as many regressions in the UI which are mostly done to chase wrong goals (tablet unification) or misguided design (go back to Windows 1 flat UI). In some ways Microsoft's Core Server variant might be a better Windows for development as was Windows Server 2003 back in the day, but I doubt it'd be fully functional on the desktop. These are just a few things that will hold back Microsoft compared to Linux and BSD, when you want to do more than just Visual Studio and Steam Games.
- pjmlp 10y agoHolding back in what sense? Personally, after a decade of dual booting between Windows and GNU/Linux, I have focused again in just Windows with GNU/Linux on VMs. At work, I seldom see anyone using anything else other than Windows on the desktop, except for a few Macs that are shared across the company for the occasional iOS project. At customer sites there is always a mixture of UNIX and Windows deployments on their server farms.
- epalmer 10y agoI worked on VAX/VMS mostly with FORTRAN and loved the hardware and the DCL (digital command language). I ending up founding and building a small company around building RDBMS based manufacturing applications using VAX/VMS as the initial computer we supported. Then we moved to UNIX and were glad we did when DEC was starting to tank. I went to NT as soon as it was available. It helped me with my productivity but it did take a long time for the applications to catch up with the OS.
- barkingcat 10y agoNo hate. Dave Cutler is the real deal with a long line of successful and groundbreaking systems. NT kernel is the work of a pro. Why do you imagine that technical people will look down on him despite groundbreaking innovations and steady decades worth of work going back to VMS? That's hardcore on a level only reached by a few, and only those also mentioned in the article - Alan Kay, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, are equals to Dave Cutler.
- moserware 10y agoDave Cutler is a legend, but he keeps a relatively low profile, so it was nice to watch the rare new video interview with him at the bottom. I especially liked what he said at the end: "I have this little saying that the successful people in the world are the people that do the things that the unsuccessful ones won't. So I've always been this person that, you know.. I will build the system, I will fix the bugs, I will fix other people's bugs, I will fix build breaks. It's all part of getting the job done." When I was a kid, I enjoyed reading "Show Stopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" that chronicled his move from DEC to build NT. Jeff Atwood has a quick review of it at http://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/
- mckilljoy 10y agoI just started reading this book, maybe half way through, it's very interesting! Some of the technical analogies are a little weak, but all the quotes and anecdotes are great.
- mapgrep 10y agoYes, I agree. It's also a fascinating window into what an achievement Windows NT was, and I say that as someone who does not use Windows anywhere. By mid 1993 Dave Cutler and his team released a multi-threaded, pre-emptive multi tasking pure 32 bit version of Windows that supported the Windows API and worked across three different hardware architectures (two of which were pure RISC processors). Apple, often lauded for being ahead of the curve, wouldn't release anything remotely matching those capabilities for eight years when OS X came out. When Apple developers were just starting to port over to Cocoa and Carbon, Windows had reached deep maturity and stability with NT and its successors (still labelled as NT versions intenrally) and basically all Windows software ran on it natively and had been doing so for years. Windows isn't exactly my cup of tea but Microsoft was way, way ahead of the curve with NT. It was a superb achievement and I strongly recommend reading Show Stopper to get a sense of what the team sacrificed, went through, and achieved.
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- sriramk 10y agoI just noticed who the OP is. Kind of cool to see Ray active on HN!
- bryanlarsen 10y agoOne of Ray's last comments was about Dave: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7540544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7540544
- vox_mollis 10y agoDave Cutler is my personal aspirational model. When I am 70, I want to still be writing production code, rather than languishing in middle management. Engineers who choose to "trade up" to management will always baffle me.
- hyperliner 10y agoIt's a personal decision. No need to hate on it. There was a recent entry here in HN where a developer discussed his/her regret at not having moved to the managerial path. I am trying to find it but it's taking me some time. It's a tough decision.
- bordercases 10y agoI'd be interested in seeing this post as well. As someone whose intellectual firepower is probably 50/50 on convergent/divergent thinking styles, it's pretty difficult for me to find a fit. Project Manager seems like the closest role I can find that can satisfy my skills and tastes.
- dunkelheit 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11436228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11436228
- UK-AL 10y agoYou have remember 90% of programmers work on fairly boring business applications. They don't get work on cutting edge stuff like cutler.
- fritzo 10y agoCutler: "I will fix the bugs, I will fix other people's bugs, I will fix build breaks."
- dursk 10y agoWould you prefer to have a manager who wasn't an engineer previously?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- robotdad 10y agoI audited a security course at UW a few years back, and one evening Cutler stopped by as a guest lecturer.
- chx 10y agoWait a minute, rozzie? You mean, Ray Ozzie is posting about Dave Cutler? Wow.
- closure 10y agoI happened to come across this article recently, an article which I think demonstrates how competitive Dave was in his youth: http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/sports/2015/07/23/dave-cutler-dewitt-athletic-hall-fame/30582389/ http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/sports/2015/07/23/d...
- TerryADavis 10y agoThe atheist nigger is in denial. God's endorsement is all that matters. If it ain't God's , it's nothing. God says... volition furrows stapler prefigured beveling phones hamster enuring Birmingham's granite's hassock fluorite's samurai's keywords Cornell's subverts rescission petrol's thereon junking Kornberg predestined tatting's Thermos Danielle's Darwin plenty Oligocene's Gallegos misdiagnoses megacycle's Vazquez's
- pacaro 10y agoI worked on a project (while a Microsoft employee) where we were told that the coding standard was CNF (Cutler Normal Form). Naively I asked what this was, whether there was a document etc. The answer was to read Dave's code and write in the same style.
- moserware 10y agoDo you remember any details from Cutler Normal Form? I'd love to learn more about this. From a quick search I see that it uses braces at the end. I'd be curious if CNF encouraged subsystem prefixes (e.g. the "Ke" in "KeBugCheck"). I wonder if CNF had any influence on "Systems Hungarian" (e.g. "dwCreationFlags") that dominates the Win32 API or if that came as an accidental offshoot of Simonyi's "Application Hungarian"
- pacaro 10y agoI don't remember much hungarian in CNF, I do remember a lot of whitespace... // // Comments are always surrounded both by empty comment lines // And by whitespace // // // The return type is always on its own line. // The function name always starts at column 0 and is whitespace delimited, // this (allegedly) was a consequence of search macros that Cutler used // int main ( int argc, char **argv) { // // Even a one line comment ends up taking up at least 4 lines // printf("Hello, World!\n"); if (argc == 2) { // // All blocks always use braces // } return 0; }
- moserware 10y agoThanks for the example! I especially found the commenting style and return type on its own line to be interesting. Regarding placement of curly braces, did you see them on their own line or at the end? This article seems to imply that CNF had braces at the end: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/peterwie/2008/02/04/pedantic-coder-where-do-braces-go/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/peterwie/2008/02/04/pedanti... I'm interested because it seems that lower-level systems programming at Microsoft put braces at the end (early .NET BCL, maybe even the first C# compiler's C++ code, TypeScript compiler source, etc), but that Microsoft documentation tended to put braces on their own line and then that became the more de-facto style that shows up in their open source code.
- phodo 10y agoLittle known factoid: When Cutler came to MS, and worked on NT, he added a cool VMS easter egg in the name WinNT: W --> -1 --> V N --> -1 --> M T --> -1 --> S VMS is/was a great OS. I was fortunate enough to work on it on a satellite communication system straight out of college. I recall adding the the TCP/IP drivers and achieving connectivity across large Wide Area Networks and setting up one of the first wireless ISDN video conference systems, in this case between former east and west berlin and moscow. There were many similar projects around the world and VMS was a lot of fun/stable to work with.
- EvanAnderson 10y agoThe Wikipedia article for Windows NT references this, but also references a statement from Mark Lucovsky stating that the original target for NT, the i860 processor, was codenamed "N-Ten" and that the "NT" name came from the target processor. It would mildly be interesting to get confirmation of the real source.
- StillBored 10y agoBell believes Cutler is the only engineer with the confidence to pull off NT as he did. “Almost anyone who would have been good enough to do NT would have insisted on a blank sheet for the spec,” Bell said. “Dave appreciates legacy and compatibility.” That seems to be what is missing most with modern software development. Everyone thinks they can do it better, and in the end repeats the same mistakes while creating new ones.
- Angostura 10y agoHmmm, I still wonder what Windows would look like today and Microsoft had chosen the same path as Apple: create an emulation box for old 'Classic' apps, create a clean new system for new style apps.
- jdblair 10y agoThat's pretty much what they did, but as a fundamental architecture of the OS. The "emulation box" is the win32 subsystem. Applications interact with the API in the subsystem, which translates, for example, win32 calls to the native NT API. They also created a POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem.
- Symbol 10y agoYou just jogged my memory about WoW (Windows on Windows) :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bmalicoat 10y agoWhen I was working on Xbox One, I got all the checkin mails. Whenever I had time, I'd look for Dave's changes and see what he did. Nearly all of them were over my head because they were so deep in the OS. The ones I understood were usually fixing other people's bugs or build breaks like he mentions in the video. It was definitely a highlight to see the actual work of someone so disciplined and dedicated to their craft.
- mrbill 10y agoOne of my neatest hardware acquisitions back in the day was a MIPS Magnum R4000 workstation - running NT 4.0. It was great, stable, and ran Windows and DOS apps in emulation (sort of like DEC's FX!32 for NT/Alpha). Per Microsoft: "On RISC-based computers, Windows NT provides a 486 emulator that runs applications designed for 286, 386, or higher processors."
- johansch 10y agoI don't really feel competent to judge all of this, but my feeling is that that Unix crowd respects Dave for his competence... they just disagree fundamentally in his design choices. I think this is fair - there is more than one way to skin a cat.
- twoodfin 10y agoThe article mentions that the original spec for NT is in the Smithsonian, and indeed it is so: http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_742559 http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah... I'd pay good money for a digitized copy. I wonder if there are any legal or Microsoft barriers to that happening someday.
- wsfull 10y agoSay what you will but I still prefer the VAX to Windows.
- taspeotis 10y ago> The small, high-powered team of former DEC engineers and one existing Microsoft employee (Steve Wood) began by spending six months creating a specification for the operating system – the specification that now resides in the Smithsonian Institute. I had to look for this, information is available here [1] but not an electronic copy. Some Googling turned up this [2] but I'm not sure how authentic it is. [1] http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_742559 http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah... [2] http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_Resource_Kit-ACADEMIC/WindowsResearchKernel-WRK/NT_Design_Workbook/Get_Workbook/ http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R...
- meddlepal 10y agoCutler is by far my favorite engineer. Great story and amazing accomplishments.
- chmaynard 10y agoSadly, it appears that Dave Cutler has not had much influence on the worldwide community of software engineers and programmers. I assume this is because his work is proprietary and he can't discuss it in public.