Exactly. And with more opinion behind it: the fact that most of those items were shipped in a extraordinarily well-supported, mass market OS literally decades ago and still didn't catch on maybe says something about the value of the design ideas.
> the fact that most of those items were shipped in a extraordinarily well-supported, mass market OS literally decades ago and still didn't catch on maybe says something about the value of the design ideas.
that statement seems heavily draw on the idea that success is the result of a meritocracy. But 'how good something is' often plays a small part in the selection of winners and losers.
In software architecture, it's really the only good evidence we have, though. I'm all for better metrics, but there aren't any. The point is just that none of these ideas are remotely "new", they've been heavily pushed by one of the biggest players in the industry for decades, and if anything was really beneficial in a profound way we'd surely know about it by now.
But we don't. So, no, that doesn't prove they're bad ideas. It does show that whatever benefit they have is underneath the noise floor of the experiment, though.
Right, I meant "catch on" in the sense of being clearly superior to the point that everything feels they need to have an answer for it and move to it. In fact the Registry[1] and Powershell are uniformly considered controversial even within their problem domain.
And I'm not arguing these things are "bad", exactly. I'm saying they aren't the panacea claimed in the article, that frankly they provide limited real benefit in a practical sense, and that the proof of this is that the one system that tried to implement them generically is aging glacially into legacy status without these ideas having propagated.
Basically: if these things were that great, at some point other systems would have picked them up while they moved on past windows. But they didn't. So... I guess my point is "why should we care about this stuff specifically?".
[1] Obviously the registry was emulated in the Linux world with the gconf/dconf stuff, which likewise was quite controversial and hasn't had anything close to universal adoption.
