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> I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on H
by joshuapants 11y ago
> I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility
There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case is addressed in the book.
- shitloadofbooks 11y agoThe Old New Thing is Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ and the book is excerpts and articles from his Blog (with some additional content no doubt). Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version of Windows.
- joshuapants 11y agoAh that's right, I think someone in a comment linked to an article on his blog and that's how I found out about the book.
- sukilot 11y agoI didn't realize that was his specific job. The blog title is so brilliant.