The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler (opens in new tab)

> His focus on quality is a trait that often seems to go unrewarded

In most companies focus on quality is something you're precluded from having, and usually it's in the same category as security and maintainability (refactoring). I've been in various planning meetings where I wasn't able to convince the dev team manager to allow time for such things, because they stubbornly wouldn't accept that these things will pay dividends sooner than they believe. As a result in most code bases it's: prototype -> production -> patch, patch, patch. This is the norm but there are also places that know better and you don't have to convince anyone of the benefits.

After reading this article I was inspired to read Showstopper again. Last time I read it was early 2000s. I must have lent it out so I had to order a new copy. Looks like they reissued it a few years back...

Yes, I agree. It's also a fascinating window into what an achievement Windows NT was, and I say that as someone who does not use Windows anywhere.

By mid 1993 Dave Cutler and his team released a multi-threaded, pre-emptive multi tasking pure 32 bit version of Windows that supported the Windows API and worked across three different hardware architectures (two of which were pure RISC processors). Apple, often lauded for being ahead of the curve, wouldn't release anything remotely matching those capabilities for eight years when OS X came out. When Apple developers were just starting to port over to Cocoa and Carbon, Windows had reached deep maturity and stability with NT and its successors (still labelled as NT versions intenrally) and basically all Windows software ran on it natively and had been doing so for years.

Windows isn't exactly my cup of tea but Microsoft was way, way ahead of the curve with NT. It was a superb achievement and I strongly recommend reading Show Stopper to get a sense of what the team sacrificed, went through, and achieved.

Cutler: "I will fix the bugs, I will fix other people's bugs, I will fix build breaks."

I'd be interested in seeing this post as well. As someone whose intellectual firepower is probably 50/50 on convergent/divergent thinking styles, it's pretty difficult for me to find a fit. Project Manager seems like the closest role I can find that can satisfy my skills and tastes.

A manager has to have the right skills to manage a project and lead people. This is usually not something you find in engineers, so like teachers, it's not the expert knowledge (e.g. tech) but soft skills that count most for a manager. Therefore, a great manager doesn't have to know to code, at all. I haven't seen a single dev lead who got promoted from developer to manager who actually managed to manage the team/project reasonably.

I would like to be offered the choice. That is, most managers come from "the business" or something, and have never been an engineer, and don't want to have been an engineer. Given a choice, I'd pick the manager that was an engineer, but those folks are pretty rare.

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.

I don't remember much hungarian in CNF, I do remember a lot of whitespace...

  //
  // Comments are always surrounded both by empty comment lines
  // And by whitespace
  //

  //
  // The return type is always on its own line.
  // The function name always starts at column 0 and is whitespace delimited,
  // this (allegedly) was a consequence of search macros that Cutler used
  //
 
  int
  main (
      int argc,
      char **argv)
  {
      //
      // Even a one line comment ends up taking up at least 4 lines
      //

      printf("Hello, World!\n");

      if (argc == 2)
      {
          //
          // All blocks always use braces
          //
      }

      return 0;
  }

That's pretty much what they did, but as a fundamental architecture of the OS. The "emulation box" is the win32 subsystem. Applications interact with the API in the subsystem, which translates, for example, win32 calls to the native NT API. They also created a POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem.