spiritual successor? how about "ghoulish horror" ;)

the worst example of "second system effect" i have ever heard of

To be fair, I actually think that the NT kernel is fine, and arguably better than Linux. It’s the rest of Windows that is terrible.

amusingly Motif and CDE were derived from HP attempts to copy Windows 2.x and the betas of Windows 3.0

not windows 3.1 -- windows 3.1 was popular! Windows before 3.1 was distinctly unpopular. It had basically no installed base. The only Windows 2.x applications I know of actually shipped an embedded Windows copy on the floppy disk.

HP was carefully tracking all the much less popular stuff Microsoft was doing in the late 80s because they thought this "WIMP" paradigm had staying powers, even if Microsoft was not exactly selling a lot of units

the common element between VMS (the subject of this post) and Windows NT, is Dave cutler.

Cutler lived in an extremely overcomplicated world of VMS kernel primitives, and given the chance to let his freak flag fly, he really overcomplicated his past work for Windows NT

In case you ever wonder why your 1 gb/s ssd has ~100 mb/s throughput on windows. there are often quite literally hundreds of layers of filters on even the simplest i/o

but it is super flexible! just slower than iced treacle. aren't you glad you had an object oriented I/O subsystem supporting microkernel services and aspect-oriented programming? i bet you use those features way more often than you read or write files from disk

motif had the opposite of versionitis

from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful

it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`

> motif had the opposite of versionitis

I basically meant that we could've avoided the (needless) versionitis of gtk, the toolkit once introduced to rewrite a Motif-based application. (Never understand why they did have to reinvent the Xt part, too, but, well…)

The Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with

The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit

Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.

Not really, because it wasn't a thing when Motif took off.

I think aix still ships CDE, too

which would be unremarkable except none of the UNIX vendors has produced a new build in like 30 years

so if they are still shipping CDE it is probably 32 bit binaries from AIX 4 or AIX 5L

"deprecated" is not "removed"

it can take literally decades for a deprecated package to actually get removed, because customers get mad

I think it is removed from rhel10. I can check if you want.

The entire 32-bit subsystem (multilib) is also removed from rhel10.

It's Motif on VMS, which is not remotely UNIX-like

eventually HPE got tired of dealing with VMS customer requests and sold the rights to VMS Software Inc, who ported it from Itanium to x86 as soon as humanly possible

now VMS Software Inc, is stating that they wish to support ye olde DECWindows and Motif on the modern, x86-enabled VMS

The ten dollar word for this is “revealed preferences”

I learned that phrase from one of the bold sentences in this article.

If you have $50k in retirement savings at age 60, you are already broke

Turning it into $40k or $70k is unlikely to impact your life outcomes

That doesn't reflect the reality of life for those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution, and especially for those in the bottom quarter. $30K is a lot of money to them. The 30th percentile of income in the US in 2023 was under $30K. They're hoping to grow their $50K to $100K or $150K before retiring at 70.

So you're saying I'm invincible!