5 ms·

Man he was really hating windows. To a point where he "wrote software for it without writing software for it directly"

sabalaba 8y ago
Writing software on windows is like using chopsticks with mittens. You can do it, it’s not pretty, and it’s not the use case the mitten sewer had in mind during development. Read the Unix Programming Environment to see the exact opposite mindset for OS design.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  What a load of nonsense. C#'s a great language and their dev tool, Visual Studio, is second to none.
  - Kagerjay 8y ago
    Developing ruby on rails apps is config hell though with windows
    - vivan 8y ago
      There's a difference between developing on Windows and developing for Windows.
  - golemotron 8y ago
    In context, the Windows Paul was talking about used C, a horrific low level SDK, and a technology called COM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model .NET did not appear until much later.
    - slededit 8y ago
      .NET integrates well with COM. You are using it all the time under the hood. COM was difficult because it was an OO framework that had to deal with: - C++ ABIs that changed on every compiler update but still had to work. -Support for C and Assembly which had no OO support at all. -Liteweight enough to run on a computer with 8MB of RAM total. Given these constraints it's unlikely you would do any better.
      - golemotron 8y ago
        Why do you think I didn't respect the technology?
        slededit 8y ago
        I'm just providing a counterweight to the "horrific" description. It was and still is pretty bad if you can't use the modern wrappers. But it served an important purpose and wasn't really possible any other way.
  - xc1020we 8y ago
    I had a different experience with Visual Studio. The IDE is slow with visible lag when typing, the menus are completely unintuitive for a person coming from Linux. Creating a "solution" (who came up with that word?) is absolutely horrible compared to just opening a file in vi/emacs. There does not appear to be a command line debugger -- while the debugger is good, graphical debuggers are a pain to use.
    - xv102z 8y ago
      And ... MSFT discovered this subthread. A couple of years ago one could still post such things freely here (ironically at the time pg was still here).
nabla9 8y ago
Everyone how had experience from alternatives hated Windows. You have now idea how bad, inelegant and even technologically behind the Window's was back then. They exploited their monopoly power to the max. Microsoft hated and did not care about the internet protocols. They pushed NetBEUI instead. Early Windows socket API was crap and unreliable compared to BSD sockets. and Netscape and web apps provided major service for abstracted that shit away. I think Intel engineers had basically rewrite the TCP/IP stack for MS at some point. Today people see X Window System as outdated, but at the time it was simpler, better and more robust than Windows. We actually bought number of gigantic but old dummy graycolor X window terminals and connected it to old 386 Linux server we used as a development machine and it was a great experience compared to anything Windows. I was working in a small company that did mostly stuff for Unix (and linux) but unlike PG and Viaweb we decided to develop complex IDE to Windows and it had to work everywhere in the world. It was just horrible programming experience.
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  Windows is still a disaster for everything but the MS-specific stack exposed through Visual Studio, including (especially?) sysadmin. How do you install software across a fleet of dozens of Windows machines? There are solutions, but they are embarrassingly poor in comparison to what's available on other systems. Salt, Ansible, et al have added half-hearted Windows support over the years, but it's pretty shallow. SCCM is a massive can of worms and very easy to FUBAR. MS's mental model of "update systems by performing clicks 1, 2, 3, and 4" is just fundamentally limited, as compared to the text-based *nix model. Even MS has been forced to come to terms with it, which is why they're finally adding real pty support, etc.

Writing software on windows is like using chopsticks with mittens. You can do it, it’s not pretty, and it’s not the use case the mitten sewer had in mind during development. Read the Unix Programming Environment to see the exact opposite mindset for OS design.

mattmanser 8y ago
What a load of nonsense. C#'s a great language and their dev tool, Visual Studio, is second to none.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  Developing ruby on rails apps is config hell though with windows
  - vivan 8y ago
    There's a difference between developing on Windows and developing for Windows.
- golemotron 8y ago
  In context, the Windows Paul was talking about used C, a horrific low level SDK, and a technology called COM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model .NET did not appear until much later.
  - slededit 8y ago
    .NET integrates well with COM. You are using it all the time under the hood. COM was difficult because it was an OO framework that had to deal with: - C++ ABIs that changed on every compiler update but still had to work. -Support for C and Assembly which had no OO support at all. -Liteweight enough to run on a computer with 8MB of RAM total. Given these constraints it's unlikely you would do any better.
    - golemotron 8y ago
      Why do you think I didn't respect the technology?
      - slededit 8y ago
        I'm just providing a counterweight to the "horrific" description. It was and still is pretty bad if you can't use the modern wrappers. But it served an important purpose and wasn't really possible any other way.
- xc1020we 8y ago
  I had a different experience with Visual Studio. The IDE is slow with visible lag when typing, the menus are completely unintuitive for a person coming from Linux. Creating a "solution" (who came up with that word?) is absolutely horrible compared to just opening a file in vi/emacs. There does not appear to be a command line debugger -- while the debugger is good, graphical debuggers are a pain to use.
  - xv102z 8y ago
    And ... MSFT discovered this subthread. A couple of years ago one could still post such things freely here (ironically at the time pg was still here).

nabla9 8y ago

Everyone how had experience from alternatives hated Windows. You have now idea how bad, inelegant and even technologically behind the Window's was back then. They exploited their monopoly power to the max. Microsoft hated and did not care about the internet protocols. They pushed NetBEUI instead. Early Windows socket API was crap and unreliable compared to BSD sockets. and Netscape and web apps provided major service for abstracted that shit away. I think Intel engineers had basically rewrite the TCP/IP stack for MS at some point. Today people see X Window System as outdated, but at the time it was simpler, better and more robust than Windows. We actually bought number of gigantic but old dummy graycolor X window terminals and connected it to old 386 Linux server we used as a development machine and it was a great experience compared to anything Windows. I was working in a small company that did mostly stuff for Unix (and linux) but unlike PG and Viaweb we decided to develop complex IDE to Windows and it had to work everywhere in the world. It was just horrible programming experience.

cookiecaper 8y ago
Windows is still a disaster for everything but the MS-specific stack exposed through Visual Studio, including (especially?) sysadmin. How do you install software across a fleet of dozens of Windows machines? There are solutions, but they are embarrassingly poor in comparison to what's available on other systems. Salt, Ansible, et al have added half-hearted Windows support over the years, but it's pretty shallow. SCCM is a massive can of worms and very easy to FUBAR. MS's mental model of "update systems by performing clicks 1, 2, 3, and 4" is just fundamentally limited, as compared to the text-based *nix model. Even MS has been forced to come to terms with it, which is why they're finally adding real pty support, etc.