by kfsone | 2026-02-15 21:00:45+00:00
Gross ignorance and incompetence.

TLDR: I don't understand my native command line, see how lost I got when I tried to do my thing in a different environment.

- Not a unique problem to Windows or even MSVC; He's gonna hate XCode,
- Making Python a bootstrap dependency = fail,
- Lacks self-awareness to recognize aversion vs avoidance,

My background is distinctly non-Windows, but I survive around Windows so well that people think I'm a Mickeysoft type. And no, I don't use mingw, cygwin, ...

If any of the obstacles this user faced were legitimate, nobody would ever make any money on Windows, including and especially Microsoft - a company whose developers have the same challenges.

I'm being harsh because _mea quondam culpa_ and it's correctable.

Everything this user went thru is the result of aversion instead of avoidance.

To _avoid_ long deep dives into Windows, you need to recognize there is a different vocabulary and a radically different jargon dialect at play.

1. Learn a tiny minimum of Powershell; it's based on the same POSIX spec as bash and zsh, but like Python, Javascript, etc, instead of byte as the fundamental unit, they use objects. So there's less to learn to reach a greater level of convenience than soiling yourself with DOS/CMD/BAT. On Windows, pwsh has a default set of linux-like aliases to minimize the learning required for minimal operability. And never have to type \ instead of / for a directory separator.

2. Microsoft make money from training. To sell their meat-free steak (* ingredient: saw dust), they feed the suits an all-you-can-eat calorie, nutrition, and protein free buffet of documenting everything in great detail and routinely "streamlining" the names and terminology.

Development on Windows is in a different reference frame, but relative to their own reference frames, they're ultimately not all that different.

Approach in your "foreign language" mindset; English alphabet but the words mean different things.

3. What not how. "How do I grep" means you are trying to random access bytes out of a random access character stream. "What's the command to search for text in files?" well, if you're bloody mindedly using cmd, then it's "find".

4. Seriously, learn a little Powershell.

I only approached Powershell hoping to gain material for a #SatansSphincter anti-ms rant while using it as a Rosetta Stone for porting shell scripts in our CI for Windows.

I mean, it is based on the same POSIX spec as sh, bash, and zsh, with a little Perl thrown in. That can't not go horribly, insidiously, 30-rock wrong in the hands of MS, right?

Turned out, it's the same paradigm shift perl/shell users have to make when coming into Python:

from `system("ps | grep hung")` to `"hung" in system("ps")`;
from `system("ifconfig -a | sed 's/\<192\.168\.0\./10.0.0./g'")` to `system("ifconfig -a").replace("192.168.0.", "10.0.0.")`

`grep` is a command that applies an assumption to a byte stream, often the output of a command.

In powershell, executing a command is an expression. In the case of a simple command, like "ps", that expression resolves to a String, just like system(...) does in Python.

Learning even a small amount of Powershell is immensely helpful in better understanding your enemy if you're going to have to deal with Windows. The formal names for official things use "verb-singularnoun".

That last part of the convention is the magic: the naming of things on Windows is madness designed to sell certifications, so crazy even MS ultimately had to provide themselves a guide.