OPINION
OPINION
I use some of their programs.
Some of them contain some very good design.
All of them are bugged, slow, obese and inefficient.
All of them are screaming to be re-written in 100% machine code.
I understand that they want to produce code quickly and cheaply, its just the way of the world today, however, they seem to have forgotten that by writing poor code, they leave themselves exposed for attack. An easy attack. A killing.
Someone, anyone, with an ounce of Machine Coding sense, could come along and takeover their entire business.. He professes this to be a major concern, and yet he leaves his attackers the capacity to come in, re code, and produce programs which could be up to 500% faster. I don't understand him, if he really wants to remain at the top of the computing pile, he MUST invest NOW in stronger code...
Their DOS was based on Interrupts, a very nice, if wasteful way of providing service routines to every other program in the system. If you *are* going to do this, then every version of their DOS should be 70% re-written, to compensate for new processor instructions, to rip out dead code, and to improve the efficiency of the old code. If you're just going to leave their DOS as a 'evolutionary relic' inside every PC then you wasted your time, and every users time, by making it based on interrupts in the first place. For the lay man, interrupt routines are just begging to be chucked out, or optimised, that's their beauty, but their construction wastes a huge amount of processing time, more in 386+ processors. Operating Systems should be written specifically for the processor they are running on.
Much of Windoze is written in 'C', C with, I might add, an amazing amount of care in naming, and logical structure. This is very nice, very pretty, and may one day be a good idea for all business programmers. Unfortunately, this methodology creates inefficient code, coupled with the time it actually takes to write this stuff, this adds up to inefficiencies in the way they write code. [Which we have to pay for].
It would be very nice, if, in 3 years time someone loads up an old bit of say, windoze code and uses the lovely commenting and naming structure to quickly add to, and maybe improve the piece of code. This does not, should not, happen outside of them. If a piece of code needs to be debugged, speeded up, or shrunken, then, I say: TRASH IT. Re-write it. I can rewrite a lump of M/C faster than I can debug it. I can rewrite 4 pieces of code faster than debug one, if that one is from another programmer, in another time. (Even *with* all the pretty names and comments)
So, you see, without my carrying my attack any further, my hatred of them stems mostly from the programming angle. I am a programmer, and I know what a mess their stuff is, and it makes me very sad indeed. However, this should not make you, if you are a non-programmer feel that my arguments do not affect you too. Quite the reverse. You pay for bad software. We pay for software which could run faster, for software which could be smaller, which could run on the machines of 5 years ago...
So, whose fault is it? Hmmm, I really *do* think that the blame can be levelled squarely at their management, who have, and have always had the capacity to understand what actually makes good code, and what makes, well, money. This 'cash and carry' philosophy is fine, should your goals be to make money quickly and then get out before you are beaten. Unfortunately they seem to believe that their company is more than this. They seem to forget that their whole code base can be re-coded, by anyone, at anytime.
In my opinion they truly are acting like those, to which power was bestowed upon by chance.
Please tell me what you thought...
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A page from James David Chapman's website.
Located at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/ Site mirrored here at: http://www.j.chap.btinternet.co.uk |
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