Say what you will but I still prefer the VAX to Windows.
The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#72> The small, high-powered team of former DEC engineers and one existing Microsoft employee (Steve Wood) began by spending six months creating a specification for the operating system – the specification that now resides in the Smithsonian Institute.
I had to look for this, information is available here [1] but not an electronic copy. Some Googling turned up this [2] but I'm not sure how authentic it is.
[1] http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah...
[2] http://gate.upm.ro/os/LABs/Windows_OS_Internals_Curriculum_R...
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#73Dave Cutler is my personal aspirational model. When I am 70, I want to still be writing production code, rather than languishing in middle management. Engineers who choose to "trade up" to management will always baffle me.
It's a personal decision. No need to hate on it. There was a recent entry here in HN where a developer discussed his/her regret at not having moved to the managerial path. I am trying to find it but it's taking me some time. It's a tough decision.
I'd be interested in seeing this post as well. As someone whose intellectual firepower is probably 50/50 on convergent/divergent thinking styles, it's pretty difficult for me to find a fit. Project Manager seems like the closest role I can find that can satisfy my skills and tastes.
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a personal decision. No need to hate on it. There was a recent entry here in HN where a developer discussed his/her regret at not having moved to the managerial path. I am trying to find it but it's taking me some time. It's a tough decision.
I'd be interested in seeing this post as well. As someone whose intellectual firepower is probably 50/50 on convergent/divergent thinking styles, it's pretty difficult for me to find a fit. Project Manager seems like the closest role I can find that can satisfy my skills and tastes.
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#75Dave Cutler is my personal aspirational model. When I am 70, I want to still be writing production code, rather than languishing in middle management. Engineers who choose to "trade up" to management will always baffle me.
You have remember 90% of programmers work on fairly boring business applications. They don't get work on cutting edge stuff like cutler.
Cutler: "I will fix the bugs, I will fix other people's bugs, I will fix build breaks."
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#76Cutler is by far my favorite engineer. Great story and amazing accomplishments.
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having switched to windows 10 after using OSX and Linux primarily for the past 10 years or so, I have to say its been fine for me. The UI is simple: hit the windows key and type the name of the program you want to launch. Switch virtual desktops with ctrl+win left/right. Snap windows to the left or right with win+left/right. And now, its actually usable for dev with the subsystem for linux feature. Oh and by the way…
Yeah, like I said, many things have been improved, but they come with as many regressions in the UI which are mostly done to chase wrong goals (tablet unification) or misguided design (go back to Windows 1 flat UI). In some ways Microsoft's Core Server variant might be a better Windows for development as was Windows Server 2003 back in the day, but I doubt it'd be fully functional on the desktop. These are just a few…
Holding back in what sense?
Personally, after a decade of dual booting between Windows and GNU/Linux, I have focused again in just Windows with GNU/Linux on VMs.
At work, I seldom see anyone using anything else other than Windows on the desktop, except for a few Macs that are shared across the company for the occasional iOS project.
At customer sites there is always a mixture of UNIX and Windows deployments on their server farms.
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#78Sadly, it appears that Dave Cutler has not had much influence on the worldwide community of software engineers and programmers. I assume this is because his work is proprietary and he can't discuss it in public.
Re: The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the example! I especially found the commenting style and return type on its own line to be interesting. Regarding placement of curly braces, did you see them on their own line or at the end? This article seems to imply that CNF had braces at the end: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/peterwie/2008/02/04/pedanti... I'm interested because it seems that lower-level systems programming at Microsoft put braces a…
I also used to work at Microsoft. CNF was primarily used in the kernel and driver code but rarely in userland code, with the exception of certain tools that were developed and maintained by the kernel team (such as powercfg.exe). CNF was one of the few coding styles at Microsoft that I really enjoyed using due to how clean and disciplined it made the code. I felt that the style really reflected Dave Cutler's attentio…
I've recently adopted CNF for Windows-based C work and I absolutely love it.