I know this comment is effectively a side tangent on a side tangent. but that was always the strangest thing to me as well. I remember in 2012 when I was debating fiddling around with Bitcoin. that was one of the things that turned me off. I was sure that there was no way something as brilliant as this was supposed to be was developed by windows user.

Which surely says something about all these ideological purity tests

▲

dijit 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Windows developers (like sysadmins) are of two kinds in my experience.

People who don't understand shit about how the system behaves and are comfortable with that. "I install a package, I hit the button, it works"

.. and

People who understand very deeply how computers work, and genuinely enjoy features of the NT Kernel, like IOCP and the performance counters they offer to userland.

What's weird to me is that the competence is bimodal; you're either in the first camp or the second. With Linux (+BSD/Solaris etc;) it's a lot more of a spectrum.

I've never understood exactly why this is, but it's consistent. There's no "middle-good" Windows developer.

	▲	salvesefu 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Probably bc, Windows users live in walled knowledge domains that tend to reinforce levels of competence (or lack of competence). Gamers tend to be somewhere in the middle though.
	▲	anthk an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Unix is easier to understand than the NT mess and everything it's in the open and documented, so you can achieve a good level of knowledge in the middle. OTOH in order to understand NT deeply you must be a reverse engineer. Also, on the other side, crazy experts under Wine (both ways, Unix and NT) OpenBSD and 9front do exist on par of these NT wizards. It just happen with Unix/9f you climb an almost flat slope (more in the second) due to the crazy simple design, while with NT the knowledge it's damn expensive to earn. With 9front you OFC need expertise on par of NT but without far less efforth. The books (9intro), the papers, CSP for concurrency... it's all there, there's no magic, you don't need ollyDBG or an NT object explorer to understand OLE and COM for instance. RE 9front? Maybe on issues while debugging, because the rest it's at /sys/src, and if something happens you just point Acid under Acme to go straight to the offending source line. The man pages cover everything. Drivers are 200x smaller and more understandable than both NT and Unix. Meanwhile to do that under NT you must almost be able to design an ISA by yourself and some trivial compiler/interpreter/OS for it, because there's no open code for anything. And no, Wine is not a reference, but a reimplementation.