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Thanks, that was excellent reading. Looking at your comment on how the file format is only declarative and sort of allows the implementer to decide what to do

Thanks, that was excellent reading. Looking at your comment on how the file format is only declarative and sort of allows the implementer to decide what to do - this is similar to what HTML does. But HTML being an open spec, actually allowed implementers to deviate in some ways but there was still some minimum expected compatibilities, so its progress didn't suffer as badly. But the Word file format was not even an open spec, so really, when people sometimes jump to Microsoft's defense, they are not even understanding how technology innovation actually suffers from closed standards which become dominant. On the other hand, Microsoft itself could have benefited from having an open standard of the file format around when it wanted to write similar exporters. Why didn't it push for it, given the enormous power it had? Surely they put their business interests over what was the best thing to do in that situation from the engineering perspective? I say all this because the more you hear from the insiders of that era, the more Joel's article is starting to look quite lopsided and biased, specifically this statement - "At no point in history did a programmer ever not do the right thing, but there you have it." It is nice to be able to fill out some of the missing details. ---- Edit: OK, are you also saying that once the initial decision was made to have a binary dump of all the data structures, there was no possibility of improving the format? If so, does it mean that every application which had its own file format and took a similar approach as Microsoft's during that time (given that you say the original developers didn't know any better), was similarly stuck? How did Word Perfect design its file format?

mikekchar 10y ago
Without throwing away backwards compatibility, it's pretty hard to improve the format. They could have easily done that, of course, but it was clearly not on the cards, politically. As a programmer, I think that's a bad decision, but it might have been the right decision for the user. It's hard to say. Word Perfect actually had a vaguely non-sucky file format. When they "handed over"[1] development from the original WP team I had the opportunity to chat with them about it. They were very, very proud of having designed an actual file format rather than just dumping crap onto disk. Essentially, it was a stream of tokens, each token representing a command. Again, it's been ages, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but you would have a "bold on" token, followed by some text, followed by a "bold off" token. For more complicated tokens I seem to remember they would embed the options in the token. If you have ever used WP, you may have seen the "reveal codes" feature (which was WP's "killer feature"). This was pretty much the actual representation of the stream. It allowed the user to see exactly how the formatting codes were layed out so that you could fix problems (instead of trying to guess why you have some bizarre vertical space in your document as you often have to do with Word). The main problem with WP's file format was that it was very, very easy to generate illegal streams or to mismatch tokens (especially to get the options wrong between the start and close tokens). I always tell people never cut and paste in WP because it will corrupt the document eventually (a little more technical background: cut and paste was implemented by going through the RTF filter and back, which could easily corrupt the tokens on the way through). [1] Cautionary tale: Word Perfect Corporation was a generous company. When Word Perfect became very, very popular, they rewarded the original programmers handsomely. However, instead of giving the programmers equity, they gave them gigantic raises. By the time Corel acquired WP, the original programmers were on salaries that would make even high flying valley programmers blush. After sitting out the time period that they were contracturally obliged to, Corel replaced those people with cheaper talent (roughly 1/10th the cost!). That included me. I always felt horrible about the situation, but fervently hoped that the programmers managed to save some of their ridiculous previous salaries.
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  Thanks for all your insights :-) Even though you feel a little conflicted about it, I would like to think all of us here at HN are very glad to know about your story.

mikekchar 10y ago

Without throwing away backwards compatibility, it's pretty hard to improve the format. They could have easily done that, of course, but it was clearly not on the cards, politically. As a programmer, I think that's a bad decision, but it might have been the right decision for the user. It's hard to say. Word Perfect actually had a vaguely non-sucky file format. When they "handed over"[1] development from the original WP team I had the opportunity to chat with them about it. They were very, very proud of having designed an actual file format rather than just dumping crap onto disk. Essentially, it was a stream of tokens, each token representing a command. Again, it's been ages, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but you would have a "bold on" token, followed by some text, followed by a "bold off" token. For more complicated tokens I seem to remember they would embed the options in the token. If you have ever used WP, you may have seen the "reveal codes" feature (which was WP's "killer feature"). This was pretty much the actual representation of the stream. It allowed the user to see exactly how the formatting codes were layed out so that you could fix problems (instead of trying to guess why you have some bizarre vertical space in your document as you often have to do with Word). The main problem with WP's file format was that it was very, very easy to generate illegal streams or to mismatch tokens (especially to get the options wrong between the start and close tokens). I always tell people never cut and paste in WP because it will corrupt the document eventually (a little more technical background: cut and paste was implemented by going through the RTF filter and back, which could easily corrupt the tokens on the way through). [1] Cautionary tale: Word Perfect Corporation was a generous company. When Word Perfect became very, very popular, they rewarded the original programmers handsomely. However, instead of giving the programmers equity, they gave them gigantic raises. By the time Corel acquired WP, the original programmers were on salaries that would make even high flying valley programmers blush. After sitting out the time period that they were contracturally obliged to, Corel replaced those people with cheaper talent (roughly 1/10th the cost!). That included me. I always felt horrible about the situation, but fervently hoped that the programmers managed to save some of their ridiculous previous salaries.

thr0waway1239 10y ago
Thanks for all your insights :-) Even though you feel a little conflicted about it, I would like to think all of us here at HN are very glad to know about your story.