[kh9000]

The section coding.pdf has their code style guidelines, colloquially known as Cutler Normal Form, CNF for short. I'm conflicted on it. Definitely overly verbose, but you can't argue with the results of the NT team. Such a rigid style guide almost feels like the technical version of a dress code. And there's an idea called "enclothed cognition" which is like, if you wear a business suit to work, it exerts a subconscious influence that results in you taking the work more seriously, focusing your attention, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclothed_cognition

[bombcar]

It's also important to remember that a ton of things we take for granted now simply didn't exist (source code control was in its infancy, merging was shit, syntax highlighting was minimal at best, compiling took time, etc).

[jen20]

Source control was in infancy compared to today, but still 15 years old (SCCS) when Windows NT development started!

[anthk]

Not with Borland products. Even XEmacs and Emacs had these features (code control was with CVS or close).

[bombcar]

CVS and RCS and friends were infants; barely more than copying directories or zip files around.

Complex merging as we're used to with git was unheard of.

[nxobject]

At least there was this...

> Note that the NT OS/2 system does not use the Hungarian naming convention used in some of the other Microsoft products.

[markus_zhang]

I agree that in general people are influenced by their perception of themselves. For example I always pretend I'm a kernel programmer when hacking on small kernels. This did lend me a lot of patience to debug and figure things out, which I do not have for my work.