I agree with mothra completely, and would like to point out that the Windows access control mechanism is far more sophisticated than *nixs. While the *nix security model is adequate for the large majority of *nix users, it does not support a single entity security model well at all. If it was as extensive as what Windows offers, you can bet it would take far more than a single chmod/chown/stat call to do the job.

While man pages in *nix are good, it's hard to beat the MSDN for content. It may not explain *how* to use something every time, but there are good examples, and most every published call, if not all, are listed. Want a bad *nix example of a man page? ioctl().

One of the things that really hacks me off about people that bitch about Windows (in particular) is that they raise hell when a function does everything for them ("I've got no control, because this one function does it *all*"), then when you give them discrete control, it's "Damn, I have to do all these steps myself? Why isn't this one function?". Basically, unless these people like Windows (and count me in that camp, as well as being a happy Linux user), they'll find something to complain about. Get over it. Shaddup and write some code.

Oh yea, and the reason *Perl* does everything for you, is because it's buried in XS calls, or other peoples modules. Perl only makes it *look* simple. And poor Larry and crew are who you should be thanking for that ease. 'C' was never, ever designed to abstract the user that far from the functionality.

I am mixed in my opinions about this.

So let me start with the uncontroversial note that I find it ironic that Larry Wall criticized Lisp as an exemplar of the "sweep-it-under-someone-else's-carpet" school of simplicity. Ironic because a large part of what I think is good about Perl is how it has encouraged people to hide complexity under someone else's carpet. (Very frequently with that someone being an author on CPAN.) This is one of the reasons that programming in Perl is productive, because you get a lot done with little work.

That said the security model of Windows is not one of the things that I would call a shining success. To be sure they have a lot of interesting ideas. However security is one thing that you don't want to get wrong, and Microsoft has done exactly that, repeatedly. Plus when I hear someone say, "sophisticated", what I hear is, "complex, poorly understood, and likely buggy". Those are not things you want in a security model.

Not that Unix is an exemplar here either. As with most things, Unix takes the approach of solving a very simple problem and declaring that to be enough. Well it isn't. With the sole exception of OpenBSD, there is not a single flavour of modern Unix that I would feel comfortable letting an untrusted and competent cracker local access to. And the security model of Unix is also singularly unsuited to handling a complex permissioning system. Plus authenticating actions by the current user/group of the process is using global data. If you need to do complex stuff with restricted access to permissions beyond the normal, well be cautious because it is easy to go wrong. (This is a key cause of why Unix is so characteristically vulnerable to root compromises.)

But for all that Unix is not very good, it is head and shoulders above Windows in practice. Largely because Unix made a lot of the mistakes that Windows is still making a long time ago. (Based on theory, I am favorably inclined to believe the claims of the EROS folks that they really do have a good security model. At least reading their articles taught me a lot about where and why security goes wrong!)

Now back to Windows and Unix. And unbridled advocacy.

IMNSHO anyone who is so put off by the perceived faults of a system that they cannot see the qualities is a narrow-minded fool. Unlike jcwren, I am not a fan of Windows. But I am not stupid either. Microsoft may not have always achieved and held their position through using the best technical product, but when they truly do put out the worst (hello Bob) they don't succeed. Windows has merits. It has things it does very well. Office is a capable office suite. A lot of research and effort went into IE. Any programmer who is blinded by bigotry and decides that this is irrelevant is hurting themselves first, second, and third.

In fact many of the things that I do not like about Windows are tied to intentional decisions. For instance I do not like the way that Windows pushes people in subtle and not so subtle ways to interact through the GUI rather than with a command line. I am not visually oriented. I generally prefer text. Always have, probably always will. (Which might be why I am writing this from Debian, using fvwm2 as my window manager. Isn't the purpose of a GUI to let you run more xterms...? :-)

What this means is that Windows is generally harder to script than Unix. But Windows is easier for most people to use on the desktop. Now do I think that it is possible to have a system that is better than either is tooday? Yes. But that doesn't change the fact that the choice to actively focus on moving people off of the command prompt and to the GUI was intentional on the part of Microsoft. And it wasn't necessarily (my preferences notwithstanding) the wrong decision to make either.

Now for two further takes on this kind of religious war see Why I hate Advocacy by Dominus, and my previous thoughts on this kind of argument at Re (tilly) 2: An interesting and poignant quote.

Programming isn't supposed to require 50+ lines to perform one simple operation. This is one of the matras of Perl: keep simple things simple. It's not like I'm trying to render an object in 3D; I am changing one piece of data (the owner SID) for a file.

Incedentally, complexity in programming arises because of the multiplicity of intent. A person creating a wizard has to specify (I imagine) a huge number of options before a program can take over: what size should the dialog box be, what color, should it return 'OK' when a user presses enter, etc. And that's just the UI!

Conversely, changing the owner of a file is a pretty unambiguous process. There is little room for misinterpretation, so the resulting code _should_ be simple. Face it: changing the owner of a file and implementing a graph algorithm for creating wizards are not even in the same league.

My whole point is this: unambiguous commands should be simple to write. If the API authors forget to make something easy doable in one line, that is understandable... but it certainly shouldn't take fifty lines.

That being said, I'm completely clueless as to what your beef is. Programming should be hard? If that's the case, you should code in assembly. Some tools are better for some things? Of course they are... but when we're dealing with an OS, then only one tool is available: that OS's API. Switching tools is not an option. High level tasks (implement graph algorithms for creating wizards) are tough? Well, duh. This isn't something an OS API should be dealing with anyway.

I would appreciate it if you would summerize your argument in a couple points (as I have been trying to do), so I can better understand what you are arguing...

-Ton