Reasons Why I Hate Windows

Reason #4,192 Why I Hate Windows

strcmp (“stir-comp”): string comparison
_stricmp (“stree-comp”): lowercase string comparison, locale-dependent
_strcmpi (“stir-compy”): equivalent to _stricmp, present for backwards
compatibility
_wcsicmp (“wicksie-comp”): wide-character version of _stricmp
wcscmp (“wicks-comp”): wide-character version of strcmp
_mbsicmp (“mibsie-comp”): multibyte-character version of _stricmp
_mbscmp (“mibs-comp”): multibyte-character version of strcmp

Naming inconsistencies! Inscrutable abbreviations!

ALSJKFHASLJDFHASDLH


Reason #8,763 Why I Hate Windows

Mysterious, obscurely named files in /Inetpub/wwwroot/ that, when
deleted, break IIS and prevent it from starting!

Yes, I realize this is my own fault for being OCD, but I don’t want
random junk showing up under http://localhost/. And, if you’re going to
have such a fragile install, at least label the file as “GRARRRRG DO NOT
DELETE ME OR YOU WILL DEATH!!!!1!!!.crap”.


Reason #8,764 Why I Hate Windows

IDEs that won’t even let you look at web application code unless there
is an active copy of IIS running on on your system.

Waiting for someone in IDSG to get me an install disc…


Reason #10,259 Why I Hate Windows

‘_’ is not considered a word character, or something to that effect.
Double-clicking to highlight a word that contains an underscore, such as
“Some_Function” will highlight either “Some”, the underscore, or
“Function”, depending on where you click.

Even better, if you get lucky and happen to double-click right on the
edge of the underscore character, you’ll get “Some_” or “_Function”!

This is definitely true in Firefox, Word, and Thunderbird, and
presumably most other userland applications. At least in Visual Studio
it does something special to know that you want to highlight the whole
function name.

We hates it.


Reason #12,830 Why I Hate Windows

When you shift while caps lock is on, uppercase characters are switched back to lower case, but the numbers are still shifted to symbols.

In my mind, shift has only one direction: up. And going up from up should not wrap around to down.


Comments

10 responses to “Reasons Why I Hate Windows”

  1. Hate to say it, but the capslock behavior is standard *NIX implementation, as well.

  2. Um, no. It’s standard IBM PC behavior, and Linux and FreeBSD emulate it. Sometimes, your BIOS will do this in hardware.

    Real Unix does not. Cf, TERM=vt100.

  3. I agree with all but the last one. Although the invertible caps lock thingy is definitely non-Mac, I’ve come to like it on my Windoze school laptop.

  4. Hurray for the fine tradition of functions with the return type at the beginning of the name, which causes you to never forget what the function’s return type is, but makes it so much more annoying to actually write code or look up the functions you care about, especially since it seems to be implemented rather haphazardly rather than standardized, while we’re at it.

    But, most of all, hurray for Windows Rot / DLL Hell. Inescapable.

    I think the Capslock thing is fine. It’s sort of standard, as others have said.

    Two years from now we’ll all be complaining about RSS support breaking the kernel. =)

  5. apologies; I sit corrected.

  6. Huh, I like the CAPSLOCK thing, since I learned to program in the OLD SCHOOL STYLE (where lower-case letters are for comments). Then it’s really useful. Not so much anymore, since I only capslock my programs if I’m modifying an existing piece of code and want to keep consistency.

  7. That rule for shifting makes perfect sense to me. Especially if you really do want to type mostly in caps but insert lowercase letters.

    The thing about letters vs. numbers is a result of capslock being selective, not shift. It’s CAPSlock, not shiftlock, after all. (And I have seen keyboards with shiftlock, though what conceivable use that could have I don’t know. After all, even capslock’s potential uses are pretty limited.)

  8. I often wish for a shiftlock. I tend to use all-caps in conjunction with special symbols when programming: eg, $VARIABLE, VARIABLE_NAME. I’ll often turn on capslock to type those, and being forced to shift for the symbol has thrown me for as long as I can remember.

    But I do agree that capslock would be entirely useless if it didn’t let you shift down.

  9. Huh. I just don’t use Caps Lock on my Mac

  10. Then what’s the point in complaining about capslock behavior? You have no ordinary behavior for Windows to disappoint you by deviating from. :P

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