Re: Misplaced flamewar... WAS: RE: in case nobody else noticed it, there was a mail worm released today

[Vadim Antonov <avg () kotovnik com>]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> Actually IMO putting all their crap in their own dir is a feature 
> rather than a bug. I really hate the way unix apps just put their stuff 
> all over the place so it's an incredible pain to get rid of it again.

Putting all crap in the working directory is bad design (no way to 
separate read-only stuff from mutable). Unix/Linux design (all over the 
place) is pure and simple lack of discipline, or "hack before thinking" 
approach.

Plan 9 nearly got it right, but for the lack of persistent mounts (it's 
all in an rc file, executed at each login).

> I think MacOS got it right: for most apps, installing just means 
> dumping the icon wherever you want it to be, deinstalling is done by 
> dropping it in the trash. The fact that the icon hides a directory with 
> a bunch of different files in it is transparent to the user.

That's UI.  Inside it's the same Unix crap.
 
> I think MS's tradeoffs are mainly time to market vs even faster time to 
> market.

It's mostly "We don't care, we don't have to, we're The Microsoft" 
mentality.

--vadim