I've called regedit.exe a lot of things over the years, and great was never one of them.

No, I don't understand it. And I don't really feel as though I want to, since I'm only working in a Windows environment because I'm too lazy to switch back and forth between a Linux one for work and Windows for games. I do web development, and it will be a cold day in hell before I touch any part of the MS web stack, so I spend most of my time remoted into one Linux box or another. Cygwin fills in the gaps. .Net? Hmmph, more like .Meh

I can!

Something very much like the, uh, modern hosts file was originally specified by rfc952 in 1985. So the venerable hosts file is nearly 30 years old! That's like 10,000 in computer years!

QED.

Terseness??

PS C:\> Get-ChildItem

[INSERT LONG ASS LIST OF FILES HERE IN SIMILAR FORMAT TO ls -l THAT SLASHDOT REFUSES TO LET ME POST]

PS C:\> Set-Location dev
PS C:\dev> Get-Content _vimrc .....

How one might obtain a directory listing in a concise format is beyond me.
Sure, those stupid commands are aliased to ls and cd, but the "real" versions are indicative of how all the commands are named. Names only a Java dev could love. Invoke-some-random-command-with-a-very-long-name-for-no-reason. LOL.

My personal favorite, however, is command invocation:

PS C:\> 7z.exe
Bad numeric constant: 7. (What??)

PS C:\> '7z.exe'
7z.exe (Uh...)

PS C:\> & '.\7z.exe' (WTF?)

7-Zip 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18

Every command drags you further and further down into the soul crushing hell that is COM, or whatever the current framework du jour is this year. I suppose it must be useful for something, but I think I'll stick with GnuWin32 and the powershell's idiot cousin, cmd.exe when I absolutely must work on a windows box.

Terseness. Hah. I'm sure the poor sons of bitches stuck administering a bunch of crufty Windows boxes get some millage out of it, but I'll be damned if I'd use it for day to day CLI work.

Silly little man, they don't have countrymen. They have SUBJECTS. They're only doing what's best for us, we're just too stupid and small minded to understand it.

The US spends six times as much in order to keep the NASA boondoggle afloat. I'm for space exploration as much as the next guy, but lets not pretend that the modern US space program is kept around for any reason other than it's a massive jobs program for the defense/aerospace industries.

That they do some good science despite the cynical, money grubbing bullshit is a miracle.

My understanding is it's C++, so a complete rewrite from the PC version. There's no way in hell it's Java, and I doubt they'd bother with XNA/C# if they had access to the real developer environment.

Some commas might make it a little better...

"The Interecept reports that contrary to lurid claims made by U.S. officials, a new independent analysis of Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA surveillance that examined the frequency of releases and updates of encryption software by jihadi groups, has found no correlation, in either measure, to Snowden's leaks about the NSA's surveillance techniques."

It is one hell of a long sentence though, definitely longer than the modern reader is used to.

You know, when you have a really nice, new, shiny weather vane. That warm and tingly sense of well being is Vane Satisfaction.

Vein Satisfaction is probably something from Dwarf Fortress. "Urist McHappyPants has been quite satisfied lately. He passed a beautiful vein of gold recently."

Sounds like it's preparing students to enter the workforce just fine then.

Ctrl-C in any alert type box copies the content to the clipboard. Well, it copies much more than that, which is weird, but it does copy the important bits. Can't find an example right now, but the format is hideous. You've got to paste it in a text editor first, but it's better than nothing.

My personal most hated feature of windows is that god awful "Choose a Folder" dialog that gives you a shitty, small tree list that you can't resize to stumble through your file system with. It's one of the absolute worst dialogs in computing history, and we've been stuck using it since at least Windows 95. The worst part is that it's possible to use the regular Open dialog for directories, but lazy ass devs use the simplest (for them) method of calling that fucking mess of shit.

Which is so much better than the good old, "We should do the opposite of what the guys with captive markets do, because they're doing it" argument.

Pointless replying to an AC, I know, but I think you mean Latin there, smart guy.

Not by a long shot! Simpering imbeciles everywhere love nano! You can frequently hear their mewling cries when confronted with a real editor: "Oh dear, how do I quit this thing?" or "Where is all the on-screen help?" or "I made a dookie!!"

Sad, really.

(mostly joking, I'm sure you don't simper! ;)

The distinction is determined solely by the prejudices of whomever is bothering to make it. Scripting is a domain in which a programming language is used, not some basic attribute of it. You could use C to write your system automation tools, but it would be a waste of time when a simple Bash script would get the job done quicker and in a far more concise manner. Likewise, you could write your virtualization software in Ruby but its going to be dog slow, and probably full of weird hacks to make shit work.

Programming languages are for solving problems, and depending on the problem you may need the higher level of abstraction provided by a so-called scripting language. Others are better served by getting as close to the metal as possible. Not every problem requires getting bogged down in the minute details of memory allocation, hardware IRQs, or chipset specific instructions. It might make it fast as hell, but you could easily get lost in the weeds and never end up solving the real problem at hand.