6 ms·

Windows is a Ghetto

66 points by nreece 18y ago

raganwald 18y ago
Zed Shaw, is that you?
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- henning 18y ago
  Not nearly enough cursing to qualify as Zed.
qwph 18y ago
...registry hives... A great piece of MS terminology, apparently the result of inter-developer conflict... http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/08/54618.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/08/54618.a...
lhorn 18y ago
Ironically, his writing is mostly about an easy kind of Windows development. Web apps behind IIS? Not that hard, really. Try building an installable desktop software for Windows. That's where real fun begins. It is quite common for teams doing Windows work to dedicate as much as 20% of available manpower to the installer alone (!). I've been coding Windows desktop in C++ since graduation in 98 and has always looked down on web programmers since they had it so easy. But once I got older I realized that all my Windows-fighting instincts and in-memory database of gotchas are nothing to be proud of: most of my career I was boxing against the platform I was working on, while some were having fun building the actual software. The irony of it is that once upon a time Microsoft was kinda cool. I was a teenager but I still remember those "good&old" days of snobby IBM/Sun/Oracle salespeople with their super-expensive software, hardware, development tools and even documentation (you could sell your car for a full copy of OS/2 SDK). And then there was Microsoft and Borland, giving their tools and docs basically for free.
- visitor4rmindia 18y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. I'm primarily a windows developer with little exposure to linux/mac and I've always found the windows API simple and pretty intuitive. But I have nothing to compare it with so I'd really like to know more. What does the desktop SDK do badly? How is this handled in linux/mac?
  - mseebach 18y ago
    I know it's not completely what you asked, but I'm with the OP - the one thing I missed the most in my one year in Windows-land last year, was the command-line shell. Everything you can do on a Linux machine, you can do in the shell Two days ago I was handed a CD with some fonts on it, and needed to get an overview of them - two lines of commands, right in the shell, took me maybe 20 minutes, to generate a HTML page with a PNG sample of each font.
    - visitor4rmindia 18y ago
      Good example. I don't dispute the fact that the command line makes it easier to do some tasks. I've had cygwin installed for a while now and I use the command line a lot but its power on native linux may be much more. As you said though, it doesn't really answer my question. I'd genuinely like to know what is poor at API level. For example, I could easily write a small utility that would display all the fonts on the CD. It would take an hour or so but the API's should let me do that (disclaimer: haven't tried it).
      - krschultz 18y ago
        The inconsistancy in the API is one of the major complaints. Here is a good explanation. I can't say I have dealt with most of it since I haven't done Windows development since pre-.NET, but I am significantly happier now that I don't. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars/3 http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could... http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars/1 http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from...
markessien 18y ago
Well, to defend windows, it's a very complex system that's used on a wide variety of hardware and for a wide variety of purposes. Most parts of it are required by someone or the other. If you don't need it, ignore it. .NET is the clean-up of windows, I suppose.
- swombat 18y ago
  Someone should have told them that sewer water is no good for cleaning up a house.
  - markessien 18y ago
    .NET is a pretty good framework. Better than any framework linux has to offer.
    - DarkShikari 18y ago
      That statement doesn't even make any sense. Linux is a kernel. .NET programs are run in userspace. The two cannot, as far as I can tell, be even tangentially related, unless you're trying to call .NET some sort of kernel API? Or is this that definition of "Linux" that people love these days, which is "whatever free software operating system distribution I happen to be most annoyed with this week"?
      - shawndrost 18y ago
        "Linux" is used here as "a linux distro" (which was pretty clear). Is there a runtime for a linux distro that is better than .NET?
        caustic 18y ago
        java virtual machine?
        shawndrost 18y ago
known 18y ago
Sometime back I wrote content management plugins for iPlanet, Apache and IIS web-servers. I had to write lots of irrational workaround wrapper code for iPlanet and IIS plugins because they are proprietary. And debugging this code was a big PITA. With Apache there were no issues because I could always step-into Apache code with GDB.
StrawberryFrog 18y ago
"Windows, was all about the GUI. Their command line was terrible, and it is terrible still. " So, he doesn't know about PowerShell.
- eru 18y ago
  PowerShell is ok, but not so hot.
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    Wow. What a flame war going on over here! Care to explain that some? I've only poked around a little with PowerShell, but it freaking looks like it could do anything. It's modular, extensible, threaded, and has this huge library base. I'm not defending -- I don't know that much about it except my initial impressions. Just curious as to why you would say that.
    - eru 18y ago
      I only poked around in PowerShell for a day or so. I do not remember much, but I was not really impressed by it, but I would say it is usable.
    - jodrellblank 18y ago
      It can do anything in the same way that any other Turing complete programming language can, but that's not really enough. As a shell, it's stuck in the same old Windows command line window that command prompt has always been, with all the problems that entails - no real resizing or decent mouse selection/copy and paste and so on. As a shell, you want terse and concise hacking, it should be optimised for finger friendliness and oneliners that you aren't going to come back to. Powershell is not. It's wordy and verbose, C# style. It makes things complex because it's not easy to find what you're looking for. Object piping might be nice, but not when you have to get all files and pipe them into a get-modified-date thing and pipe the date objects into a date-to-text object instead of ls -... As a programming language, it's seriously ugly. It could have been VBScript slid towards Python, instead it's C# slid towards Perl. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/10/18/emit-xml.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/10/18/emit-xml... from the official powershell blog from the main man behind powershell. $Ugh -*! See also this discussion from November last year: "What's MS thinking with Powershell?" at Arstechnica: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/128001068831/p/1 http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/...
greyman 18y ago
Windows is the most used operating system, so to call it a Ghetto is wrong by definition, IMHO. In my experience, Visual Studio 2008 with .NET libraries and MSDN is very good development platform.
wmoxam 18y ago
I spent several years writing ASP applications and administering dozens of Windows servers running IIS (amongst other things). I had many of the same problems as the author such as: "I have absolutely no clue what error 0×00001ad59add means, and I am the goddamned system administrator I’m supposed to contact" It sucked the life out of me.

Windows is a Ghetto

66 points by nreece 18y ago

raganwald 18y ago

Zed Shaw, is that you?

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
henning 18y ago
Not nearly enough cursing to qualify as Zed.

qwph 18y ago

...registry hives... A great piece of MS terminology, apparently the result of inter-developer conflict... http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/08/54618.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/08/54618.a...

lhorn 18y ago

Ironically, his writing is mostly about an easy kind of Windows development. Web apps behind IIS? Not that hard, really. Try building an installable desktop software for Windows. That's where real fun begins. It is quite common for teams doing Windows work to dedicate as much as 20% of available manpower to the installer alone (!). I've been coding Windows desktop in C++ since graduation in 98 and has always looked down on web programmers since they had it so easy. But once I got older I realized that all my Windows-fighting instincts and in-memory database of gotchas are nothing to be proud of: most of my career I was boxing against the platform I was working on, while some were having fun building the actual software. The irony of it is that once upon a time Microsoft was kinda cool. I was a teenager but I still remember those "good&old" days of snobby IBM/Sun/Oracle salespeople with their super-expensive software, hardware, development tools and even documentation (you could sell your car for a full copy of OS/2 SDK). And then there was Microsoft and Borland, giving their tools and docs basically for free.

visitor4rmindia 18y ago
That's an interesting perspective. I'm primarily a windows developer with little exposure to linux/mac and I've always found the windows API simple and pretty intuitive. But I have nothing to compare it with so I'd really like to know more. What does the desktop SDK do badly? How is this handled in linux/mac?
- mseebach 18y ago
  I know it's not completely what you asked, but I'm with the OP - the one thing I missed the most in my one year in Windows-land last year, was the command-line shell. Everything you can do on a Linux machine, you can do in the shell Two days ago I was handed a CD with some fonts on it, and needed to get an overview of them - two lines of commands, right in the shell, took me maybe 20 minutes, to generate a HTML page with a PNG sample of each font.
  - visitor4rmindia 18y ago
    Good example. I don't dispute the fact that the command line makes it easier to do some tasks. I've had cygwin installed for a while now and I use the command line a lot but its power on native linux may be much more. As you said though, it doesn't really answer my question. I'd genuinely like to know what is poor at API level. For example, I could easily write a small utility that would display all the fonts on the CD. It would take an hour or so but the API's should let me do that (disclaimer: haven't tried it).
    - krschultz 18y ago
      The inconsistancy in the API is one of the major complaints. Here is a good explanation. I can't say I have dealt with most of it since I haven't done Windows development since pre-.NET, but I am significantly happier now that I don't. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars/3 http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could... http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars/1 http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from...

markessien 18y ago

Well, to defend windows, it's a very complex system that's used on a wide variety of hardware and for a wide variety of purposes. Most parts of it are required by someone or the other. If you don't need it, ignore it. .NET is the clean-up of windows, I suppose.

swombat 18y ago
Someone should have told them that sewer water is no good for cleaning up a house.
- markessien 18y ago
  .NET is a pretty good framework. Better than any framework linux has to offer.
  - DarkShikari 18y ago
    That statement doesn't even make any sense. Linux is a kernel. .NET programs are run in userspace. The two cannot, as far as I can tell, be even tangentially related, unless you're trying to call .NET some sort of kernel API? Or is this that definition of "Linux" that people love these days, which is "whatever free software operating system distribution I happen to be most annoyed with this week"?
    - shawndrost 18y ago
      "Linux" is used here as "a linux distro" (which was pretty clear). Is there a runtime for a linux distro that is better than .NET?
      - caustic 18y ago
        java virtual machine?
        shawndrost 18y ago

known 18y ago

Sometime back I wrote content management plugins for iPlanet, Apache and IIS web-servers. I had to write lots of irrational workaround wrapper code for iPlanet and IIS plugins because they are proprietary. And debugging this code was a big PITA. With Apache there were no issues because I could always step-into Apache code with GDB.

StrawberryFrog 18y ago

"Windows, was all about the GUI. Their command line was terrible, and it is terrible still. " So, he doesn't know about PowerShell.

eru 18y ago
PowerShell is ok, but not so hot.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  Wow. What a flame war going on over here! Care to explain that some? I've only poked around a little with PowerShell, but it freaking looks like it could do anything. It's modular, extensible, threaded, and has this huge library base. I'm not defending -- I don't know that much about it except my initial impressions. Just curious as to why you would say that.
  - eru 18y ago
    I only poked around in PowerShell for a day or so. I do not remember much, but I was not really impressed by it, but I would say it is usable.
  - jodrellblank 18y ago
    It can do anything in the same way that any other Turing complete programming language can, but that's not really enough. As a shell, it's stuck in the same old Windows command line window that command prompt has always been, with all the problems that entails - no real resizing or decent mouse selection/copy and paste and so on. As a shell, you want terse and concise hacking, it should be optimised for finger friendliness and oneliners that you aren't going to come back to. Powershell is not. It's wordy and verbose, C# style. It makes things complex because it's not easy to find what you're looking for. Object piping might be nice, but not when you have to get all files and pipe them into a get-modified-date thing and pipe the date objects into a date-to-text object instead of ls -... As a programming language, it's seriously ugly. It could have been VBScript slid towards Python, instead it's C# slid towards Perl. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/10/18/emit-xml.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/10/18/emit-xml... from the official powershell blog from the main man behind powershell. $Ugh -*! See also this discussion from November last year: "What's MS thinking with Powershell?" at Arstechnica: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/128001068831/p/1 http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/...

greyman 18y ago

Windows is the most used operating system, so to call it a Ghetto is wrong by definition, IMHO. In my experience, Visual Studio 2008 with .NET libraries and MSDN is very good development platform.

wmoxam 18y ago

I spent several years writing ASP applications and administering dozens of Windows servers running IIS (amongst other things). I had many of the same problems as the author such as: "I have absolutely no clue what error 0×00001ad59add means, and I am the goddamned system administrator I’m supposed to contact" It sucked the life out of me.