But nobody is expecting 30 years of backwards compatibility. Just keeping old printer drivers working. It's not like printers are devices we need all too much anymore. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that users will have discontinued printers at home.
Kinda similar to Rosetta 1 and 32 bit binaries on x86. I get their motivation but killing Rosetta 1 basically meant that all old games that came out in the PPC era couldn't be played anymore and killing of 32 bit binaries made the Apple logo in Steam useless. It's not like people expect that this works like how early win32 application still work on Windows. They could totally make the user jump through a bunch of hoops to get support for their old applications. But they didn't.
Windows has become a hodgepodge of code bases from a variety of time periods and philosophies, some of which leans on some ancient stuff that can’t be touched.
Hell, they had to skip Windows 9, just to prevent breaking 95/98 software from braking.
The average SW engineer here in HN wouldn’t know how fast they’d get to a keyboard to complain if they were to find a codebase like that at their job.
That’s not to say it’s necessarily bad, even if it can be cumbersome, it’s just to highlight the cost of maintaining that compatibility and a difference in philosophy.
asyx|1 year ago
Kinda similar to Rosetta 1 and 32 bit binaries on x86. I get their motivation but killing Rosetta 1 basically meant that all old games that came out in the PPC era couldn't be played anymore and killing of 32 bit binaries made the Apple logo in Steam useless. It's not like people expect that this works like how early win32 application still work on Windows. They could totally make the user jump through a bunch of hoops to get support for their old applications. But they didn't.
turquoisevar|1 year ago
Windows has become a hodgepodge of code bases from a variety of time periods and philosophies, some of which leans on some ancient stuff that can’t be touched.
Hell, they had to skip Windows 9, just to prevent breaking 95/98 software from braking.
The average SW engineer here in HN wouldn’t know how fast they’d get to a keyboard to complain if they were to find a codebase like that at their job.
That’s not to say it’s necessarily bad, even if it can be cumbersome, it’s just to highlight the cost of maintaining that compatibility and a difference in philosophy.