I was scrolling through Reddit earlier today and saw that Microsoft announced the open sourcing of their Windows calculator. Overall I think it's pretty interesting for a couple of reasons, namely that it's a good opportunity to learn by checking out their code (although it's a shit ton of code at ~300k lines, it's a calculator, why?!), and that it could mean that some of their more interesting projects also become open source in the future (Soltaire anyone?).
I saw something interesting about the Pinball game, which I played a lot when I was younger, in the comments of one of the threads:
Raymond Chen: two of us tried to debug the program to figure out what was going on, but given that this was code written several years earlier by an outside company, and that nobody at Microsoft ever understood how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!
One more reason supporting the writing of maintanable code with good comments! ;)
Also, as pointed out by some other people in the comments, apparently the calculator sends telemetry, which means that stuff pasted into the calculator actually gets sent to Microsoft. For some people this could be quite upsetting, as you obviously don't want your information to be used, especially when it's not really needed for an application like a calculator. Unfortunately I don't think this is really something extreme, and is probably commonplace in many other applications (of which you probably also don't expect it).
Anyway, my main goal with this post is to actually start writing more about open source stuff, not just my own projects, and seeing what others on here think about certain subjects. As this is the first post, I don't really want to flesh it out too much, and see if others would even be interested in something like this in the first place. So, let's see - what do you guys think about this?
