161–170 of 356 posts
This mindset is even less ethical than it seems, and I'm not surprised to see it present at microsoft.
What do you mean by "ethical" here, and why is it unethical to preserve ABI compatability?
Straw man. What's unethical here is deceiving the user.
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>It serves as a great vehicle to blare loud sirens at testing time that you (the programmer) screwed up (and that's ok, we all do), and it's time to figure out where and how to fix it :) Right, but if you read the article, the author is talking less about the developer experience and more about the user experience. "blare loud sirens" is great if you're a tester/developer, not so much if you're an end user. When it c…
Even as an end user, I hate when my computer seems to be trying to hide something from me. Even if I can't do anything about it, I want to know it's happening. Don't worry, Microsoft. I'm a grown-up and can handle the bad news. If I'm a layman, maybe I just dismiss the dialog and try again. But if I'm a little more of a power user, maybe I'll look up the error message and see if I can start diagnosing or helping. If…
In many cases like this, crashes like this are in app startup, so it's not like you learn not to hit a certain button - it's just that the app doesn't work, an awful UX.
As called out in the article, there are (and always should be) APIs like "IsPrintingEnabled" so that forward-thinking apps can show better UX. These practices aren't for those apps, they're for everyone else.
Also, if your app preserves state well enough that a keep-alive daemon can restore after a crash and the user doesn't notice, that is ABSOLUTELY an improvement in UX over just crashing. Sure, you should still fix the bugs, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
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Error design depends on context. For most of the systems I work on, fail fast on request for anything out of spec is the correct design. B2B/Microservices/API focused systems. Windows however has focused on bending over backwards to provide compatibility (including memory patching popular software that was broken, like Simcity https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-... ). In the context of a user…
It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Recently I had to read an old Access file and where I work we still keep Office '97 around for this purpose and it is quite amazing that it installs and works just fine on Win 11, Clippy works just fine, in fact all the other lame-ass things Office '97 does to take over your desktop all still work even if they don't quite visual…
Here's a pretty detailed list:
- It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year.
- It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in Windows NT 3.1 x86 on a modern 2024 Intel/AMD PC running Windows 11 with absolutely no modifications to said binary whatsoever. Windows NT 3.1 is 31 years old this year.
- It is possible to write one binary and target multiple versions of Windows by simply choosing a Platform Toolset, which is paired with a Visual C/C++ Redistributable.
- Windows has a run-as mode to run programs in what is essentially a super-thin VM; like you mentioned, emulating different iterations' behaviour for a given program.
All four of these are nearly impossible on Linux. The fourth is essentially Docker, which is needed even to target an older glibc (i.e. the equivalent of the first situation). Windows has gone to extreme lengths to not only maintain API compatibility, but ABI compatibility as well. The fact that unmodified binaries from 20, 25, 30 years ago can run without a hitch is a testament to how important backwards/forwards compatibility still is on Windows.
Side tangent: all the criticisms levelled at Windows here and in many hacker fora are limited to its userspace—things like its shell and user-space programs, and trivial complaints like 'Candy Crush', or 'start bar', or 'extra right click', or even 'PowerShell aliased curl to Get-Content, grr'. The userspace changes so often because it can; it is a superficial part of Windows. To the haters: Try actually programming with NT OS primitives and even the (undocumented) NT syscalls. It is as enjoyable as UNIX system programming, and I daresay more productive.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-sg/cpp/build/configuring-prog...
[2]: https://building.enlyze.com/posts/modern-visual-studio-meets...
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This is the Microsoft way to do things, this is why their products like Windows are so crappy, full of bugs, unexpected behaviors and a big dump of shit of legacy behaviors expected on top of a lot other legacy behaviors on top of another 1989 legacy behavior that every forgot.
Much of the crappy legacy behavior that Microsoft maintains is the fault of other applications, not themselves. The classic one is the error code for the file open function. Early DOS would return error codes of only 3, 4, 5, and no more. DOS programs would actually just indirect-jump using the error number as an index into a lookup table of addresses. When Microsoft tried to add any error codes (say 6), the program…
Well. I have two or three (I am not even sure because for one email address there are probably two accounts, but no way to distinguish between them) MS Teams accounts. There is no painless way to switch between them. Currently there are probably at least three different MS Teams apps installed on my machine, one of them self-installed without my consent (my PC is not managed by an org or domain, it's mine). Switching accounts involves several confusing errors, at least three password inputs, and several complaints by MS Teams that something is wrong, but it won't tell me how to fix it.
Use the browser version they said. Well for scheduled meetings it works, but for adhoc calls Firefox does not (there is no reason provided, but at least it does say outright), while Chrome seems to work but does not transmit my voice and camera. All other meeting software, of course, works.
I am not the youngest anymore and this is my lifelong experience with Microsoft. Its software works barely enough to sell to corporations; poor users have to endure it.
I've learned this as "swallowing errors" and IMO it's a poor practice. Not only does it not solve the issue at hand (you cannot print on an xbox), but it actively hides how broken the software is, which makes bug discovery and testing much harder. This is one thing I like about Go's panic. You're mostly not supposed to use it or recover from it at run time. It serves as a great vehicle to blare loud sirens at testing…
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>It serves as a great vehicle to blare loud sirens at testing time that you (the programmer) screwed up (and that's ok, we all do), and it's time to figure out where and how to fix it :) Right, but if you read the article, the author is talking less about the developer experience and more about the user experience. "blare loud sirens" is great if you're a tester/developer, not so much if you're an end user. When it c…
That is a dangerous assumption. Unless you know a great deal about every possible use case, you can't know the potential ramifications of incorrect output. Proceeding from invalid state (which would often be the result of swallowing errors) is essentially undefined behavior.
People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.
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>It serves as a great vehicle to blare loud sirens at testing time that you (the programmer) screwed up (and that's ok, we all do), and it's time to figure out where and how to fix it :) Right, but if you read the article, the author is talking less about the developer experience and more about the user experience. "blare loud sirens" is great if you're a tester/developer, not so much if you're an end user. When it c…
Maybe then raise an assertion error, which only has an effect in development mode.
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That every single behavior that attempts to guess the users's intent becomes a relied upon part of the software, and this over time grows to an impossible amount of cruft. See this, hilariously hosted also by microsoft: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/funny-sto... > And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to b…
In 2024, so we still have websites that are served differently depending on the User Agent? Could we possibly do away with the User-Agent header, or reset it to a simple “Chrome 150.01”?