The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler

Exactly. Windows 8 and 10 include substantial improvements to the underpinnings that would be worth the switch from Windows 7 if Microsoft didn't basically kill the UI. This stupid desire to change stuff for a new version, as done with cars, does nobody good.

- 3D widgets serve a purpose and make it much easier to see what's a widget and what's not

- Windows XP theme engine was great and it got killed in Windows 7

- Windows XP and Windows 2000 UI was to the point and didn't waste screen real estate like 7, 8, 10 do as well as current OS X and GNOME or KDE. First we complained open source desktops had no designers, now we should curse the day we wished for designers to get involved.

- all Windows tools and subsystems got much better and featureful and there's new filesystems and subsystems, but you cannot take the core and slap on a different desktop environment like you can with Unixes. Back in the day you could use a different Windows Shell, but I don't know if that's still possible.

I have this suspicion that Cutler has a private build of Windows on his machine which still has Classic UI, but the product managers would never allow that to get published, or else they would be wrong to have killed it off in the first place. This constant desire to change the UI is unbelievable and hard to explain. Imagine if new knives would follow the same mantra. Many things work best the way they are with no need to change, and if change is wanted, something like Windows XP's theme engine is more than sufficient.

The only thing that (IMO) came close was OS/2.

I really wish Warp had beaten Windows 95. It was astounding. The kicker was that the Windows VM in OS/2 was, in some ways, actually more stable than the native apps [1].

> Ironically, if you never ran native OS/2 applications and just ran DOS and Windows apps in a VM, the operating system was much more stable.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-sy...

EDIT: From the same article:

> Meanwhile, Dave Cutler’s team at Microsoft already shipped the first version of Windows NT (version 3.1) in July of 1993. It had higher resource requirements than OS/2, but it also did a lot more: it supported multiple CPUs, and it was multiplatform, ridiculously stable and fault-tolerant, fully 32-bit with an advanced 64-bit file system, and compatible with Windows applications. (It even had networking built in.) Windows NT 3.5 was released a year later, and a major new release with the Windows 95 user interface was planned for 1996. While Windows NT struggled to find a market in the early days of its life, it did everything it was advertised to do and ended up merging with the consumer Windows 9x series by 2001 with the release of Windows XP.

Would you prefer to have a manager who wasn't an engineer previously?

After reading this, I have so much I would give my right arm to ask him (similar to my sentiments on other luminaries). His focus on quality is a trait that often seems to go unrewarded in his very institution, and I often struggle to reconcile the success I see achieved with the merit based success often insinuated, and the act of "getting things done" often seems blocked with politics and bureaucracy.

Clearly however he's found success through this, I can only hope he sticks around long enough that I may selfishly brush shoulders and share some of his wisdom, I find there to be far too few who have managed to succeed to that level of notoriety/accomplishment while maintaining the principles he seems to uphold, and would love to learn more from those who have on how they approached surmounting their environment. (on that note, thanks for the showstopper link, the review was more than sufficient to motivate a longer read)

Do you remember any details from Cutler Normal Form? I'd love to learn more about this.

From a quick search I see that it uses braces at the end. I'd be curious if CNF encouraged subsystem prefixes (e.g. the "Ke" in "KeBugCheck").

I wonder if CNF had any influence on "Systems Hungarian" (e.g. "dwCreationFlags") that dominates the Win32 API or if that came as an accidental offshoot of Simonyi's "Application Hungarian"