Comment by dmurray
4 hours ago
I understood Windows named some of the most important directories with spaces, then special characters in the name so that 3rd party applications would be absolutely sure to support them.
"Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)" aren't there just because Microsoft has an inability to pick snappy names.
Fun fact: that's not true for all Windows localizations. For example, it's called "Programmi" (one word) in Italian.
Renaming system folders depending on the user's language also seems like a smart way to force developers to use dynamic references such as %ProgramFiles% instead of hard-coded paths (but some random programs will spuriously install things in "C:\Program Files" anyway).
The folders actually have the English name in all languages. It's just explorer.exe that uses the desktop.ini inside those folders to display a localized name. When using the CLI, you can see that.
At least it's like that since Windows 7. In windows XP, it actually used the localized names on disk.
And then half of your programs would be in "Program Files" because those people never knew windows had localizations.
Should have called it Progrämmchen, to also include umlauts Ü
A lot of programs break on Polish computers when you name your user "Użytkownik". Android studio and some compiler tools for example.
Microsoft is hilariously bad at naming things
user: How do I shutdown this computer?
tech: First, click on the "Start" button...
user: No! I want to shut it down
I remember they prepended the word “Microsoft” to official names of all their software.
"My Documents" comes to mind. it seemed somehow infantilizing. yes, yes i know whose documents they are.
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