Comment by dmurray
1 month 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.
And then affected international users would have specific circumvention in place that specifically cannot work with UTF-8
You forgot the wonderful "Documents and Settings" folder.
Thank god they came to their senses and changed it to "Users", something every other OS has used for forever.
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.
Ah, Polish. I love this movie scene, which I learned about here on HN some time ago: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz" -- https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
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When I was at Microsoft, one test pass used pseudolocale (ps-PS IIRC) to catch all different weird things so this should have Just Worked (TM), but I was in Windows Server team so client SKUs may have been tested differently. Unfortunately I don't remember how Program Files were called in that locale and my Google-fu is failing me now.
As I recall pseudoloc is just randomly picking individual characters to substitute that look like the Latin letters to keep it readable for testing, so it would be something like рг (Cyrillic) ο (Greek)... etc, and can change from run to run. It would also artificially pad or shorten terms to catch cases where the (usually German) term would be much longer or a (usually CJK) term would be much shorter and screw up alignment or breaks.
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Microsoft is hilariously bad at naming things
Visual Studio Code has absolutely nothing to do with Visual Studio. Both are used to edit code.
.NET Core is a ground up rewrite of .NET and was released alongside the original .NET, which was renamed .NET Framework to distinguish it. Both can be equally considered to be "frameworks" and "core" to things. They then renamed .NET Core to .NET.
And there's the name .NET itself, which has never made an iota of sense, and the obsession they had with sticking .NET on the end of every product name for a while.
I don't know how they named these things, but I like to imagine they have a department dedicated to it that is filled with wild eyed lunatics who want to see the world burn, or at least mill about in confusion.
Don't forgot .net Standard which is more of a .net Lowest Common Denominator.
For naming, ".net" got changed to "Copilot" on everything now.
> they have a department dedicated to it that is filled with wild eyed lunatics who want to see the world burn, or at least mill about in confusion.
That's the marketing department. All the .NET stuff showed up when the internet became a big deal around 2000 and Microsoft wanted to give the impression that they were "with it".
Anyone remembers the "Windows Live" brand everywhere in the early 2000s?
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Java and Javascript would like to have a chat :)
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But Copilot is another Microsoft monstrosity. There's the M365 Copilot, which is different from Github Copilot which is different from the CLI Copilot which is a bit different from the VSCode Copilot. I think I might have missed a few copilots?
Yep, they have the public copilot which is a free version and seemingly different than their m365 copilot. Even using the same account on both doesn't even transfer the chat history and apparently m365 is somehow recommended mostly to non tech folks even though its the one you pay for
JavaScript was intentionally named in order to ride the Java hype train, so this wasn't accidental.
Prior names included Mocha and LiveScript until Netscape/Sun forced the current name.
user: How do I shutdown this computer?
tech: First, click on the "Start" button...
user: No! I want to shut it down
They fixed that by
1) Removing the "Start" label such that all the money and effort they spent coming up with that actually good idea back in the 90s and helping people think about how to use their computer not only went to waste, but is actively preventing people from feeling comfortable using their modern computers because a tiny circle with a logo is not something you are driven to click and various linux distros had been demonstrating that exact problem for decades
2) Hiding the shutdown part in a weird new menu that pops out of the side but only if you use a gesture that is impossible to discover except by accident and you will have no clue how you got there or what's going on
>To shut down Windows 8, you can use the Charms bar by moving your cursor to the top-right corner, clicking Settings, then the Power icon, and selecting Shut down
Someone who makes my entire net worth a year came up with that idea in a drug fueled bender and was promptly promoted and the world continues to be a terrible and unfair place.
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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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TIL it was deliberate!