Anyone attempting, or purporting to do this job should know this, and if they don't know this, then that very fact is the unforgivable thing.
I say this as someone who has barely programmed anything for windows. I managed to make a custom version of putty for work that replaced the registry for a text file for settings, and made it lauchable to make saved sessions portable. And I managed the amazing engineering feat of producing a .exe that wraps a twain scanner library. No ui, just a cli that copies argv to the library calls. And I wrote a powershell script that talks to a device over rs232.
Thats about it. More than my mom could do but all in all essentially nothing.
The criticism of this utter shit is not elitism.
When I first had that work project to hack on putty, at first I took a look just to see if I could figure it out. I immediatly decided I could not figure it out in any reasonable time.
So I tried to hire a freelancer to do it. Pay someone who actually does this, right?
You know what they did? For $3k usd in 2005 or so? They fucking called regedit. As in they executed the regedit exe in a system call to import a text reg file. The settings are still stored in the registry, and I already knew how to run regedit to export and import .reg files. I could have done that much by just wrapping my exe in a bat file that runs regedit before launching putty, and that would have been a better engineered result than putting it in a system call, because it would be more flexible since the bat could be modified infinitely later without recompiling.
They were working on c code that already had code examples in it for working with the registry directly, and for reading and writing files, and yet when they needed to read a file to load settings, they ran an external executable that reads a file and puts the contents into the registry.
And putty actually has a fairly modular settings module! The registry stuff isn't baked in all over the place. There is a single c file that does all of the settings storage and retrieval. You can essentially swap the whole file out with anything else.
Am I some supergenius just because I knew enough to not try to do a job I didn't know how to do?
Am I a supergenius just because I was able to at least read code even if I couldn't write it, enough to see what it was doing and that it was a shit way to get the outward appearance of what I asked for?
How come you aren't completely offended and scandalized by solutions like these? What code that I rely on are you writing right now?
We do indeed all have dirty underwear but this is not a case of "not an expert". That is inexcusably misrepresenting the essence of the criticism here.