Hacker News Reader

Comment by b1gFanOfVMS | Hacker News Reader

I can only imagine the hate this guys going to get here for NT...but I'm a huge fan.

One of mt first jobs was running a VMS cluster...then went on to work with Windows. Enjoyed it all. Dave Cutler is brilliant.

Thanks Dave!

View on HN

Core NT is, or at least was, prior to NT 4 putting graphics in the kernel, very very nice. It's mostly what Microsoft did on top of it, and their general stewardship of it that I have a problem with.

For the latter, I noticed a serious drop in quality starting with 3.51 SP2, which to the best of my ability on Google seems to have come out 9 months before NT 4.

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.

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 games just work, chrome just works, spotify just works, intellij just works and all of this can be installed from the cli with chocolatey.

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 things that will hold back Microsoft compared to Linux and BSD, when you want to do more than just Visual Studio and Steam Games.

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.

He's a great engineer and, together with his equally great team, he designed what turned out to be a great kernel powering countless machines around the world.

There is very little to hate about the actual NT kernel.

Kudos to Dave, instead.

I worked on VAX/VMS mostly with FORTRAN and loved the hardware and the DCL (digital command language). I ending up founding and building a small company around building RDBMS based manufacturing applications using VAX/VMS as the initial computer we supported. Then we moved to UNIX and were glad we did when DEC was starting to tank.

I went to NT as soon as it was available. It helped me with my productivity but it did take a long time for the applications to catch up with the OS.

No hate. Dave Cutler is the real deal with a long line of successful and groundbreaking systems. NT kernel is the work of a pro.

Why do you imagine that technical people will look down on him despite groundbreaking innovations and steady decades worth of work going back to VMS? That's hardcore on a level only reached by a few, and only those also mentioned in the article - Alan Kay, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, are equals to Dave Cutler.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com