3 ms·
> Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world. I wish it would just quietly die in a corner. As
by DrBazza 3y ago
> Microsoft really needs to take a real hard look at Windows and figure out what its place is in the world.
I wish it would just quietly die in a corner.
As a developer Windows has brought us such highlights as:
* backslash instead of forward slash
* magic paths with drive letters, spaces, and tildas (for you kids, that 8.3 DOS compatible path names)
* its own custom C/C++ project format rather than make, that accidentally gave birth to CMake
* VBA, and all associated viruses
* exclusive file locks
I can't be bothered to go on, but the man-hours/years/decades/centuries spent on making code work on Linux and Windows is spectacular.
- jodrellblank 3y ago> "backslash instead of forward slash" Why not try Start -> Run c:/windows and see what happens? > "magic paths with drive letters, spaces, and tildas (for you kids, that 8.3 DOS compatible path names)" Linux systems have magic paths like /sys and paths with tildes (isn't that where /~username in URLs came from?) and path/filenames with arbitrary byte sequences which cannot even be displayed safely: https://dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html > "VBA, and all associated viruses" VBA is Visual Basic for Applications, it came from Office not Windows.
- mrguyorama 3y agoAnd yet, with all that supposedly terrible cruft, it's still a more stable and reliable interface to program against than pretty much anything in Linux world. The best Linux api is Win32. Oh, and that also means if you wrote Windows API compliant code in 1998, it still works today.
- ziml77 3y agoI still can't get over how wild it is to look back at even Windows 1.0 documentation and see familiar functions.