Windows is a Ghetto

http://brandonbyars.com/blog/articles/2008/10/19/windows-is-a-ghetto

by nreece • 18 years ago

66 43 18 years ago

brandonbyars.com

raganwald• 18 years ago

Zed Shaw, is that you?

henning• 18 years ago

Not nearly enough cursing to qualify as Zed.

qwph• 18 years 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.a...

lhorn2• 18 years 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.

visitor4rmindia5• 18 years 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?

mseebach2• 18 years 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.

jd• 18 years ago

Building an installer isn't so difficult anymore. NSIS and similar installer builders are really easy to learn and very stable. Windows has many flaws, but the whole install/uninstall system works remarkably well in practice.

It's far more difficult to create RedHat RPM packages and Debian packages and so forth.

But 20% of all manpower? That seems a bit much.

pchristensen2• 18 years ago

I don't know about the percentage but Carl Franklin said that Visual Studio has over 50 people on the installer team. Granted, that's probably one of the heaviest installs out there.

LogicHoleFlaw• 18 years ago

I've done some RPM packaging and it's actually pretty straightforward. The LSB hammered out most of the individual differences between distros from an installation standpoint. And once you set it up you get all of the benefits of robust package management.

lhorn2• 18 years ago

The problem isn't getting your files in the right place, the problem lies in how inter-connected and "integrated" everything is on Windows. There are many examples: "Internet Settings", for instance, from the control panel, while they seem to be IE's settings, actually affect how some Windows Internet-family API functions behave. Then there is a big hairy mess called COM/ActiveX: you can't parse XML without it, yet there will be computers, be it one out of 100, with broken XML parser COM registration. Same applies to various "shell services" which are essential to desktop integration.

Then there are cases when other applications break your code: Symantec used to install their own version of MFC DLL right into System32. Then there are super-aggressive anti-spyare/anti-virus/anti-whatever packages that are basically hacks breaking all kinds of legit software. Windows encourages this style of development: when an application essentially becomes a collection of COM servers scattered across your hard drive, hooked into your system via complex mesh of registry settings. And there is no way around it: this is what MSDN tells you to do.

Then you'll have users complaining that when they launch your RSS reading software (or whatever you do), they get a popup that says "Windows Installer: configuring Microsoft Office" that disappears after about a minute of "collecting system information". And users will tell you that everything worked great for 2 months but then "computer did something" and this popup started appearing.

And they keep adding more shit on top of existing shit. Now, in addition to COM and MSI and registry you get this "side-by-side execution" bullshit, when you can't even tell which version of a DLL is being loaded and Windows Explorer essentially hides fucking files from you so even locating a misbehaving DLL becomes a debugging session on its own, where you'll need to decode cryptic hidden directory names and extract a manifest from some executable's resources to see which DLL it actually wants. When they rolled that out I felt sick for a while.

And finally, there is no such thing as "Windows API" anymore. XP machine connected to a domain controller/AD is a very different beast than XP home or Win2K. I'm not even mentioning Vista here.

For my last Windows project I went for "xcopy deployment" with one single fat executable statically linked to everything it needed to run with some help from open source libraries, essentially very similarly to how Firefox does it. But this style of development isn't really for "Windows Platform", this way you're targeting a "sane subset" of Windows platform.

markessien2• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

Someone should have told them that sewer water is no good for cleaning up a house.

markessien2• 18 years ago

.NET is a pretty good framework. Better than any framework linux has to offer.

known• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

"Windows, was all about the GUI. Their command line was terrible, and it is terrible still. "

So, he doesn't know about PowerShell.

eru2• 18 years ago

PowerShell is ok, but not so hot.

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years 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.

anthonyrubin2• 18 years ago

He specifically mentions PowerShell. Compared to what is available for UNIX-like systems PowerShell may very well be terrible (I haven't used it). There is more to the command line experience than the shell itself.

thorax2• 18 years ago

Emotions aside, PowerShell is definitely one of the most innovative shell adaptations in the past few years. Some group in MS tried really hard to take things to the next level.

Now whether that level is where people want to go-- well, that's hard to say. It's difficult to judge "success" for this sort of a thing. How much usage is because MS is pushing it and how much is because it scratches some itches?

For me, it's slow to start up, and not overly useful for my everyday tasks. Still, most of the demos are impressive and the idea of piping objects around rather than raw text/files seems like an idea with a lot of potential.

jm4• 18 years ago

Isn't PowerShell only available to Vista users? That's a small minority of Windows users. Besides, there's not much emphasis on it either so it still feels as if the command line is sort of second class in Windows.

I've had a PC running Vista for a while now (it was cheaper than XP and I need Windows for music software) and I couldn't even tell you how to start PowerShell. I don't even know if PowerShell is different from the old Start->Run->cmd. That one looks the same as it ever did.

To be honest, the thought of poking around in PowerShell never even occurred to me because the Windows command line has never been of much use in the past. That's likely part of the problem. The inferiority of the Windows command line is very deeply ingrained in users. Still, even if a user does bother to figure it out it's still very clear that pointing and clicking is heavily favored over typing commands on a Windows system.

As far as I can tell PowerShell seems much more geared for sys admins creating scripts that run automatically than for user interaction. Based on what I've read about PowerShell, I would consider it to be more similar to something like Perl than a bash shell.

smhinsey• 18 years ago

Powershell is at least also available on XP.

greyman• 18 years 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• 18 years 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

Related Stories