| Ok this particular piece of garbage software is not the crime of the century, and we all have dirty underwear, but there is nothing about this that deserves the tiniest bit of empathy. This is not an empathy situation. This is an atrocious job full stop. 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. |
> THIS is why your software is slow. it's not "web tech" or "electron" or "JIT compilation" or any fucking sorting algorithm
> it's boneheaded _design decisions_ made to avoid doing things properly in packages with 1,600,000 weekly downloads.
> :DDDDDDDDDD this is why everyone hates nodejs developers
Yes, you can criticise a piece of software for doing something X way, but you don't have to shit on the people who made it in the process. Imagine being the person who implemented this waking up and seeing that.