notepad dot electron
VS Code, which is an Electron application, opens text files something like 20 times faster than the new Notepad.
Whoever wrote and shipped the new Notepad should feel ashamed at their failure as a professional software engineer.
This isn't some Github toy project. It's being forced onto billions of users, without the slightest bit of quality assurance or adherence to the basic practices of the art.
Steady on old chap. Who's to say the hapless developer isn't embarrassed about things themselves, but is prevented from doing the right thing by some management edict, ancient process etc.
My money's on that rather than one person's incompetence.
And they should choose possible homelessness?
The original claim was that they were a failure.
The hypothetical is that they are not a failure, but are "prevented from doing the right thing". In the hypothetical, they should quit and get a new job.
The new Notepad is not fit-for-purpose. You cannot use it to open a file several gigabytes in size. It'll just die, take minutes, fill memory, and even if it opens successfully, it'll be unusably slow.
It's the Windows equivalent of 'vi'. It has to work, all of the time.
I hate this argument so much
It's like being perfectly fine with a universe with as much suffering as long as no one is dying. I am exaggerating of course, but why inflict this suffering to a BILLION people? I feel bad when I annoy someone for a few seconds (like struggling to open a door) and yet people are perfectly nonchalant to create ecosystem that billions of people use everyday for the next decade at least.
Are you sure?
---- "Larry started to explain about some of the places where he thought that he could improve things, but Steve wasn't interested. He continued, "You know, I've been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day."
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?" --- https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
In fact, I have done similar things.
For example, I was asked to develop a protocol-shim for an authentication system used by tens of thousands of people accessing one of the largest SAP systems in the country. I wrote the code, tested it, and said to the PM that the only thing missing for go-live is some HTTPS certificates to make it secure.
He asked me to go to production anyway to meet his deadline, and that the certificates will be fixed up later.
I straight up told him: "No."
The look on his face was hilarious. He called my boss, my boss' boss, and up.
I told all of them: "No."
We waited for the certificates to be issued.
whoa there, you don’t know that. you think you do because you’re getting a ton of upvotes and you’re leaning into the feeling you had when you wrote that comment — the anti-Microsoft comment on a site known for its anti-microsoft comments.
if you don’t work at Microsoft, you have very little hope of understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft. there’s a lot more there than meets the eye, just like there is at any huge company.
I do know what Microsoft is or isn't doing.
The evidence is in the pudding: opening a large text file in the new Notepad is orders of magnitude slower than any other editor on my system. This is a common failure mode that is trivially caught by testing. It's a well understood problem space, much like how databases "get slower" as the data volume increases, but the well understood solution is to use indexing to make this not occur.
The fact that the Notepad team spent months (years?) working on a trivial text editor and never tested it with text files speaks volumes.
If they had ever opened a large text file, they would have immediately noticed that a mistake had been made. Much like how if a database developer runs a query over large amounts of data, the missing indexes are immediately obvious.
It takes a minute for Notepad to open a file that isn't even "huge".
A minute isn't slow. It's broken.
They shipped broken software to the public, at the scale of hundreds of millions or even billions of users.
> understanding the motivations of a team, a product manager, or even a single developer within Microsoft.
Clearly, performance and quality are never motivations at Microsoft.
Their motivations are irrelevant for an end-user. Their results are.
If you don't think it should, I remind you that you can't take the humanity out of a human.
You really don't do your argument any favours with exaggerations like this.