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Rumors of Cmd's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (microsoft.com)

Posted by msmash on from the stating-it-out dept.

Senior Program Manager at Microsoft has responded to speculations that Command Prompt is going away. He writes: The Cmd shell remains an essential part of Windows, and is used daily by millions of businesses, developers, and IT Pro's around the world. In fact:
1. Much of the automated system that builds and tests Windows itself is a collection of many Cmd scripts that have been created over many years, without which we couldn't build Windows itself!
2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!
3. Many of our customers and partners are totally dependent on Cmd, and all its quirks, for their companies" existence!
In short: Cmd is an absolutely vital feature of Windows and, until there's almost nobody running Cmd scripts or tools, Cmd will remain within Windows.

20 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Good! by DogDude · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm glad! CMD is critical in our company, too.

    MS actually does a really good job supporting things for a long time. Some other responses, I'd imagine...

    Apple: We're brave enough to stop supporting any version of CMD that came out before this year.

    Google: We killed it. Too bad.If you don't buy our ads, then we don't really care about how you use our software.

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    1. Re:Good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Apple : You can still use CMD, you just have to dongle-chain 3+ apps to get it to work. Oh yeah, and that'll be $500. You're welcome.

      Google : We've decided arbitrarily to change CMD to DMC, but we'll probably switch it back and forth 2 or 3 times in the coming week. Business dependencies? What are they?

      Amazon : CMD will be replaced by a flying mothership powered by cosmic rays. (*Bong sounds)

      HP : We've decided to sell off CMD and focus on shit people no longer need or want instead.

      IBM : Spending 200 million on our own cutting-edge CMD app was probably not a good idea, but hell, it's just money right? We're IBM, it's fine.

      Adobe : In order to use CMD, you simply have to sign up for our $200 a month subscription service to everything else we sell. What a deal!

      Facebook : Anything you type into a CMD prompt is FB property and will be tattooed on your soul forever. #Progress. 'Zuck '2042

      WSJ : We will no longer call CMD line input "commands", we'll just fill your screen with DOS and let the reader decide what it is.

      Trump : I love CMD, it's the best for hacking. Very strong commands! Why is Bash so weak and girly?

    2. Re:Good! by deadwill69 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Seems someone forgot to do their homework:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      Paradigm Multi-paradigm: Imperative, pipeline, object-oriented, functional and reflective
      Designed by Jeffrey Snover, Bruce Payette, James Truher (et al.)
      Developer Microsoft

    3. Re:Good! by mdm-adph · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How easy would that be, though? The way cmd and powershell works is fundamentally different: cmd is string-based, like bash, but powershell is object-based. Powershell really is a different animal entirely once you start using it.

      --
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    4. Re:Good! by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Informative

      Maybe they could make it so Powershell doesn't take 15-30 seconds to actually become useful.

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      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    5. Re:Good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oracle: Now that you're using CMD, we're going to shake you down for licensing fees or sue you.

      Congress: CMD is flawed so we should dismantle it without a good alternative in place. With fewer regulations and more tax cuts, the market will create a better CMD.

      Samsung: *KABOOM*

      Liberals: Trump loves CMD, so it's probably sexist or racist.

      Conservatives: Liberals hate CMD so we love CMD.

      YouTube: Please watch this advertisement before continuing to use CMD.

      Wikipedia: !!!PLEASE GIVE US MONEY!!! "Command Prompt" redirects here. For the concept, see command prompt.

  2. WTF? by Major+Blud · · Score: 4, Informative

    1) Who suggested that it dead?

    2) Oh wait, there's no link to an article to state who it said it.

    I mean really.....

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    1. Re:WTF? by Major+Blud · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When it was originally posted, there was no link. I'm not the only person here to state so.

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      If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
    2. Re:WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!

      How do they know that? Polls have been made? Oh, wait. Telemetry.

  3. This is why Microsoft is going down! by 31415926535897 · · Score: 4, Funny

    C'mon guys, have COURAGE!

  4. Proof that they're spying on you by erapert · · Score: 4, Insightful

    2. Cmd is one of the most frequently run executables on Windows with a similar number of daily launches as File Explorer, Edge and Internet Explorer!

    The only way they could know that is if they're spying on everyone who uses Windows.
    Am I wrong? Is there some other, totally consensual and benign way that they could know this?

    1. Re:Proof that they're spying on you by WaffleMonster · · Score: 4, Funny

      No one every denied that there's proof. Most people just agree that it's entirely benign and used for statistic gathering.

      Please don't use "spying" in this context, you're diluting the meaning of the word to suit your personal agenda.

      I completely agree. The word "stalking" is much more apt than "spying".

  5. Need more coffee by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Did anyone else read that as CmdrTaco has died, or at least as a hoax of his death?

  6. Re:as expected by alex67500 · · Score: 5, Funny

    When I read the title I first thought it was about CmdrTaco...

  7. Re:Riiiiight by EndlessNameless · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft makes virtually all of their software revenue from enterprise sales. And killing a legacy tool as widely-used as CMD will piss them off.

    So while I believe Microsoft will not hesitate to give home users the middle finger, I seriously doubt they will kill CMD any time soon.

    Everything new is in PowerShell, but we have a lot of old crud that runs in CMD because no one wants to break it.

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    According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
  8. CMD should never have existed in the 1st place. by emil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Windows NT was designed by Dave Cutler, who chose C as the language for the NT kernel. It was the most significant impact of UNIX on NT.

    Cutler also designed VMS, and likely had deep familiarity with "Digitial Command Language" (DCL) that is a well-built and powerful command processor itself (if you like writing your scripts in FORTRAN).

    Cutler wanted to "get UNIX." Why he allowed a product as shockingly poor as cmd.exe to be written for the NT command shell simply baffles me.

    The cmd.exe shell is described as a serial killer by Microsoft employees.

    I also disagree with elevating BASH. Steven Borne disliked C, and retrofitted ALGOL on it, not only for the parsing syntax that became BASH, but also on top of the C compiler itself.

    Cutler had a chance to see source code for multiple OS implementations and their parsers: RSX11, UNIX sh/csh, DEC DCL, and likely many more. How cmd.exe could have emerged from his group is quite simply beyond me.

    1. Re:CMD should never have existed in the 1st place. by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It took Microsoft a decade and a half to produce a proper shell for Windows NT/Win32. In that time they seemed to try everything else but a shell; VBscript/Jscript, WMI objects, registry commands, but at every iteration they were told "Look at the Bourne shells, for chrissakes, that's what we want!" The deep fear and hatred of all things *nix at Microsoft inevitably lead them to just implement half-ass solutions. Even Powershell is an overly verbose and frankly rather slow shell, but at least it allows for automation of most aspects of the Windows server.

      What it really boils down to me is that Microsoft never really understood, nor did they ever really want to understand how sysadmins used and manipulated servers. Windows carried on the long-standing DOS tradition of pushing in their own direction regardless of what made sense or what the rest of the industry was doing; a willful exercise in refusing to accept long-standing principles of system administration. Everything about Windows administration always made me feel like I was using some idiot's half-ass attempt at remaking Unix, so that you could go to a point, but never beyond that. For years there was a whole industry built on filling in the holes in COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    2. Re:CMD should never have existed in the 1st place. by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think that's because Windows just isn't a command-line culture at heart like *nix. I think instead it's more of a GUI/Application culture, which makes sense, if you think about it, as the focus was on visual applications from the start. As such, a typical Windows developer thinks about embedded scripts inside an application to automate things, and using OLE to inter-operate with other programs or data. *nix developers pass data (often text) from small, focused utility to small focused utility, typically with Bash or another shell as the glue, because it's legacy came from text-only environments with a powerful shell. It's just two different ways of thinking about solving problems, but server administrative problems and application solutions are not necessarily equivalent, as you indicated.

      I'd also posit that this is one reason why *nix tends to do well in server spaces, since working remotely is comfortable even through a simple terminal, and why Windows does well on the desktop, since most users are more comfortable with graphical interfaces than a command-line. That's not the only reason, of course, but I think it contributes.

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      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  9. Re:Wait a second. by slapout · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, but it's only a byte, so Windows crashes when it reaches 256...

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  10. CE / WMI / ETC / other telemetry by Hobart · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Parent poster summarizes things well.

    Debian's PopCon is similar ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/co... )

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