6 ms·

notepad dot electron

jiggawatts 4y ago
The new Notepad uses XAML, probably using Win UI 2 or 3. VS Code, which is an Electron application, opens text files something like 20 times faster than the new Notepad. Whoever wrote and shipped the new Notepad should feel ashamed at their failure as a professional software engineer. This isn't some Github toy project. It's being forced onto billions of users, without the slightest bit of quality assurance or adherence to the basic practices of the art.
- beachy 4y ago
  > Whoever wrote and shipped the new Notepad should feel ashamed at their failure as a professional software engineer. Steady on old chap. Who's to say the hapless developer isn't embarrassed about things themselves, but is prevented from doing the right thing by some management edict, ancient process etc. My money's on that rather than one person's incompetence.
  - donatj 4y ago
    You put up the stink of your life or you quit. Anything less and you are a coward and shouldn't work in the industry.
    - __ryan__ 4y ago
      In this hypothetical, the individual is choosing between possible homelessness and making Microsoft look bad by following Microsoft’s orders and releasing bad software. And they should choose possible homelessness?
      - userbinator 4y ago
        "possible homelessness"? For someone who at least met the bar for getting hired by Microsoft? On the contrary, I think that individual would easily find a job somewhere else.
      - j-bos 4y ago
        Who are these software engineer's working at Microsoft in the year 2022 at risk of homlessness?
        __ryan__ 4y ago
        In this hypothetical, the same person who is a “failure as a software engineer”, according to a parent commenter.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        You mixed up two scenarios. The original claim was that they were a failure. The hypothetical is that they are not a failure, but are "prevented from doing the right thing". In the hypothetical, they should quit and get a new job.
    - GauntletWizard 4y ago
      Cowards ship. Shippers get raises and promotions. Software quality declines.
  - 8note 4y ago
    That's a difference between developer and engineer. It's part of an engineer's job to not put out the garbage required by bad management, and instead signal to regulatory agents and media that management is attempting to say, put changes into a bridge that will cause it to call down, killing the first people to step on it
    - anthony_d 4y ago
      I’m ready to agree with you as long as you understand software engineering isn’t a thing.
    - leetcrew 4y ago
      we're talking about the default text editor on an OS that supports endless alternatives. yes, it's an embarrassment, but (approximately) no one is dying because notepad is janky.
      - jiggawatts 4y ago
        There can be late night disaster recovery scenarios where logging into an under-resourced virtual machine and using Notepad to view a huge log file is the difference between success and failure. Failure can mean huge companies going under, life & death, suicides, end of careers, you name it. The new Notepad is not fit-for-purpose. You cannot use it to open a file several gigabytes in size. It'll just die, take minutes, fill memory, and even if it opens successfully, it'll be unusably slow. It's the Windows equivalent of 'vi'. It has to work, all of the time.
      - kajaktum 4y ago
        > No one is dying I hate this argument so much It's like being perfectly fine with a universe with as much suffering as long as no one is dying. I am exaggerating of course, but why inflict this suffering to a BILLION people? I feel bad when I annoy someone for a few seconds (like struggling to open a door) and yet people are perfectly nonchalant to create ecosystem that billions of people use everyday for the next decade at least.
      - dev_tty01 4y ago
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    I would absolutely refuse to ship anything of this piss-poor quality. I would refuse to even participate if I wasn't allowed to achieve at least the existing tool's quality level. In fact, I have done similar things. For example, I was asked to develop a protocol-shim for an authentication system used by tens of thousands of people accessing one of the largest SAP systems in the country. I wrote the code, tested it, and said to the PM that the only thing missing for go-live is some HTTPS certificates to make it secure. He asked me to go to production anyway to meet his deadline, and that the certificates will be fixed up later. I straight up told him: "No." The look on his face was hilarious. He called my boss, my boss' boss, and up. I told all of them: "No." We waited for the certificates to be issued.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  > It's being forced onto billions of users, without the slightest bit of quality assurance or adherence to the basic practices of the art. whoa there, you don’t know that. you think you do because you’re getting a ton of upvotes and you’re leaning into the feeling you had when you wrote that comment — the anti-Microsoft comment on a site known for its anti-microsoft comments. if you don’t work at Microsoft, you have very little hope of understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft. there’s a lot more there than meets the eye, just like there is at any huge company.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    Famously, Microsoft fired their entire QA team and now relies only on telemetry. They similarly fired their technical writing team, and now beg the public to write their documentation through pull-requests. I do know what Microsoft is or isn't doing. The evidence is in the pudding: opening a large text file in the new Notepad is orders of magnitude slower than any other editor on my system. This is a common failure mode that is trivially caught by testing. It's a well understood problem space, much like how databases "get slower" as the data volume increases, but the well understood solution is to use indexing to make this not occur. The fact that the Notepad team spent months (years?) working on a trivial text editor and never tested it with text files speaks volumes. If they had ever opened a large text file, they would have immediately noticed that a mistake had been made. Much like how if a database developer runs a query over large amounts of data, the missing indexes are immediately obvious. It takes a minute for Notepad to open a file that isn't even "huge". A minute isn't slow. It's broken. They shipped broken software to the public, at the scale of hundreds of millions or even billions of users. > understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft. Clearly, performance and quality are never motivations at Microsoft.
    - naikrovek 4y ago
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    >if you don’t work at Microsoft, you have very little hope of understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft Their motivations are irrelevant for an end-user. Their results are.
- ripley12 4y ago
  > without the slightest bit of quality assurance or adherence to the basic practices of the art. You really don't do your argument any favours with exaggerations like this.

The new Notepad uses XAML, probably using Win UI 2 or 3. VS Code, which is an Electron application, opens text files something like 20 times faster than the new Notepad. Whoever wrote and shipped the new Notepad should feel ashamed at their failure as a professional software engineer. This isn't some Github toy project. It's being forced onto billions of users, without the slightest bit of quality assurance or adherence to the basic practices of the art.

beachy 4y ago
> Whoever wrote and shipped the new Notepad should feel ashamed at their failure as a professional software engineer. Steady on old chap. Who's to say the hapless developer isn't embarrassed about things themselves, but is prevented from doing the right thing by some management edict, ancient process etc. My money's on that rather than one person's incompetence.
- donatj 4y ago
  You put up the stink of your life or you quit. Anything less and you are a coward and shouldn't work in the industry.
  - __ryan__ 4y ago
    In this hypothetical, the individual is choosing between possible homelessness and making Microsoft look bad by following Microsoft’s orders and releasing bad software. And they should choose possible homelessness?
    - userbinator 4y ago
      "possible homelessness"? For someone who at least met the bar for getting hired by Microsoft? On the contrary, I think that individual would easily find a job somewhere else.
    - j-bos 4y ago
      Who are these software engineer's working at Microsoft in the year 2022 at risk of homlessness?
      - __ryan__ 4y ago
        In this hypothetical, the same person who is a “failure as a software engineer”, according to a parent commenter.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        You mixed up two scenarios. The original claim was that they were a failure. The hypothetical is that they are not a failure, but are "prevented from doing the right thing". In the hypothetical, they should quit and get a new job.
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    Cowards ship. Shippers get raises and promotions. Software quality declines.
- 8note 4y ago
  That's a difference between developer and engineer. It's part of an engineer's job to not put out the garbage required by bad management, and instead signal to regulatory agents and media that management is attempting to say, put changes into a bridge that will cause it to call down, killing the first people to step on it
  - anthony_d 4y ago
    I’m ready to agree with you as long as you understand software engineering isn’t a thing.
  - leetcrew 4y ago
    we're talking about the default text editor on an OS that supports endless alternatives. yes, it's an embarrassment, but (approximately) no one is dying because notepad is janky.
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      There can be late night disaster recovery scenarios where logging into an under-resourced virtual machine and using Notepad to view a huge log file is the difference between success and failure. Failure can mean huge companies going under, life & death, suicides, end of careers, you name it. The new Notepad is not fit-for-purpose. You cannot use it to open a file several gigabytes in size. It'll just die, take minutes, fill memory, and even if it opens successfully, it'll be unusably slow. It's the Windows equivalent of 'vi'. It has to work, all of the time.
    - kajaktum 4y ago
      > No one is dying I hate this argument so much It's like being perfectly fine with a universe with as much suffering as long as no one is dying. I am exaggerating of course, but why inflict this suffering to a BILLION people? I feel bad when I annoy someone for a few seconds (like struggling to open a door) and yet people are perfectly nonchalant to create ecosystem that billions of people use everyday for the next decade at least.
    - dev_tty01 4y ago
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  I would absolutely refuse to ship anything of this piss-poor quality. I would refuse to even participate if I wasn't allowed to achieve at least the existing tool's quality level. In fact, I have done similar things. For example, I was asked to develop a protocol-shim for an authentication system used by tens of thousands of people accessing one of the largest SAP systems in the country. I wrote the code, tested it, and said to the PM that the only thing missing for go-live is some HTTPS certificates to make it secure. He asked me to go to production anyway to meet his deadline, and that the certificates will be fixed up later. I straight up told him: "No." The look on his face was hilarious. He called my boss, my boss' boss, and up. I told all of them: "No." We waited for the certificates to be issued.
naikrovek 4y ago
> It's being forced onto billions of users, without the slightest bit of quality assurance or adherence to the basic practices of the art. whoa there, you don’t know that. you think you do because you’re getting a ton of upvotes and you’re leaning into the feeling you had when you wrote that comment — the anti-Microsoft comment on a site known for its anti-microsoft comments. if you don’t work at Microsoft, you have very little hope of understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft. there’s a lot more there than meets the eye, just like there is at any huge company.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Famously, Microsoft fired their entire QA team and now relies only on telemetry. They similarly fired their technical writing team, and now beg the public to write their documentation through pull-requests. I do know what Microsoft is or isn't doing. The evidence is in the pudding: opening a large text file in the new Notepad is orders of magnitude slower than any other editor on my system. This is a common failure mode that is trivially caught by testing. It's a well understood problem space, much like how databases "get slower" as the data volume increases, but the well understood solution is to use indexing to make this not occur. The fact that the Notepad team spent months (years?) working on a trivial text editor and never tested it with text files speaks volumes. If they had ever opened a large text file, they would have immediately noticed that a mistake had been made. Much like how if a database developer runs a query over large amounts of data, the missing indexes are immediately obvious. It takes a minute for Notepad to open a file that isn't even "huge". A minute isn't slow. It's broken. They shipped broken software to the public, at the scale of hundreds of millions or even billions of users. > understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft. Clearly, performance and quality are never motivations at Microsoft.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >if you don’t work at Microsoft, you have very little hope of understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft Their motivations are irrelevant for an end-user. Their results are.
ripley12 4y ago
> without the slightest bit of quality assurance or adherence to the basic practices of the art. You really don't do your argument any favours with exaggerations like this.