[rescue] FrameMaker FYI (MS crap)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 @ 13:48 -0500, Kevin said:

> This is 100% second hand information (to me, and third hand to
> you), but from what i was told by an X-MS employee, MS has real
> problems understanding the inner details of a lot of their older
> software due to the very poor documentation and organization
> practices of their past.

I met some 'softies in Charlottesville, VA years ago, and that's what
they told me too.

They said that churn was so bad, few people understand the core of 
quite a bit of their software.

They also said the there is tons of "threads" in Windows that basically
runs solely to keep parts from crashing, and to keep things looking
seemless.  Tons of little funky conversions and redirections all over
the place, which get harder and harder to manage with each passing year.

They said it didn't start out that way, but basically all the good ideas
in NT were corrupted over time, and relatively quickly, starting with NT
4.0 and getting steadily worse.

As far as code management, some of the guys used it extensively, while
others said their work was a crapshoot.  

Note: M$ is hardly the only company to operate like this.  I've been in
some pretty bad shops myself.  But them, we were not distributing our
software to the whole planet either.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [javalin: an unwieldy programming weapon used
to stab a software project through the heart until dead]