How many Microsoft missteps were forks that were just a bit of fun? Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has dropped another nugget of Microspeak – the "fun fork." While forking a repository nowadays can be anything other than fun – just ask HashiCorp about OpenTofu – in Microsoft parlance of old, a "fun fork" is a code branch that will never get merged back into the parent, one where …
This long predates Microsoft. Unix has had a fork(2) system call since the 1970s.
Wikipedia says "The word "fork" has been used to mean "to divide in branches, go separate ways" as early as the 14th century.".
Did anyone claim otherwise? Chen is talking specifically about the phrase "fun fork", as used at Microsoft. His point about the term "fork" specifically is that it was used in "fun fork" because when that phrase was coined, they didn't have a change-management system that supported branches.
(Similar alliterative phrases using "branch" are left as an exercise for the reader.)
> Chen added: "Usually, a fun fork is created so that a team can experiment with a large, complex feature. If the experiment proves successful, the team can move the changes from the fun fork to a product branch."
Why do that ?
Since the Fun Fork contains an entire (working) code base, simply redesignate it as Production and give it a comforting name like Windows 8, 10 or 11…
"Definitely no-one who has ever done any useful Dev work
Actually I've been designing and developing software for 40-odd years as a systems engineer on projects with budgets in some cases running to millions. The key lesson this taught me really early on was "exercise caution" -- a basic engineering principle that seems to have been largely forgotten, particularly in the software dev environment. "Wacky" means "not rationally justified", but the engineering approach is to justify any idea rationally before staring to implement it so that unexpected adverse consequences don't arise. Once so justified, the idea is no longer "wacky".
> The key lesson this taught me really early on was "exercise caution" ... so that unexpected adverse consequences don't arise.
Like, say, doing it entirely within a fork, completely away from any chance of production release, and in the full expectation that the result will be at least cleaned up and refactored, maybe even completely recoded, before it gets anywhere near the production code?
You know, sort of like the TFA described, from the very opening title, all the way through?
Do you now want to rethink your statement
>> The M$ dev teams need to grow up and accept that responsibility
> "Wacky" means "not rationally justified"
That was a very surprising claim, so I had a quick check.
Ah, it appears that in the US the third dictionary[1] definition does indeed include the word "irrational".
So, I shall take this entire exchange as being a Win, a strike against the yankification of Good Old El Reg (and a despairing shake of the head at people who will pick third defintion as an excuse to leap into outrage).
[1] third in Collins, third in Merriam Webster; Cambridge doesn't get as far as "irrational" (although some of the synonyms indicate disapproval or disbelief, mainly in a humourous way)
> "Wacky ideas" have no place in the development of an effectively monopolist tool relied on by businesses throughout the World to keep their lights on. The M$ dev teams need to grow up and accept that responsibility.
Leaving aside the usual El Reg sarcasm about "Recall", I wonder what an actual dev might consider to be a "wacky idea", something that could be played with for a bit of fun? Is there anything at all that maybe Mr "I know what Fun is" Mike could possibly have ever used (whether or not he knew it, after the actual IT people had done it for him)?
Remember, with Raymond Chen's stuff, we are talking about the entire history of Windows, so perhaps our happy-go-lucky dev heroes had crazy - oops, sorry "Wacky" - ideas like:
* I wonder if I could just whip up a tool to help fiddle with all those Registry settings we're reading to control the UI? Ta-da: PowerToys (Note the "toys" in the name) and especially TweakUI! They were absolutely vital in the days of yore and even though they are no longer quite as good at making the UI behave itself, I make sure that I have the current lot installed (as I have a lovely old mechanical keyboard, I use Keyboard Manager remap the totally useless CAPS LOCK to be a slighty-useful Windows Key and SCROLL LOCK to Apps/Menu, just to name one use).
* Ya know, Word is ok, and Excel gets a load of use, I wonder if it would be possible to sort of "embed" one inside the other?
What Mike has clearly missed is that an awful lot of things start out as a dev just having a fun idea and playing around with it - outside of Microsoft we have silly little things like Linux - heck, lile Unix full stop! Or anything that came out of Xerox PARC, directly or indirectly - nothing terribly useful, just the GUI sitting on top of an entire OS![1]
[1] yes, yes, I know that there was all sorts of intermingling with other groups, but for today, let's just stick with the story that Xerox did it all and Apple nicked it and then Microsoft did a knock off and...
Reading through your post I don't find any example of something I would regard as wacky.
Regarding providing a reasonable user interface to manage the computer (ie PowerToys) is not wacky unless you are a CLI diehard.
Maybe your definition of wacky is "not officially endorsed"?
> Maybe your definition of wacky is "not officially endorsed"?
Try "that'll never work" or "what a waste, nobody needs that" or "you can't do that without confusing the user"...
You are looking back on things that *did* work, and which you've become used to, and saying "well, that is just normal".
Even TweakUi got (a few) negative responses (from clearly demented people) about making your PC nonstandard ("how can you stand working like this?" is something I've heard a few times over the years)
"Wacky ideas" have no place in the development of an effectively monopolist tool relied on by businesses throughout the World"
You do know this is pretty much how that tiny company called Google does a lot of it's new Dev work. Heck they even have it a name and publish some of it... I.e. Google labs, although most of it is AI crap these days.
One man's "wacky" is another man's "revolutionary Idea which hits the mark with its intended audience".
I've tended to call them "proof of concept" ventures. Some lead to nothing but others have shown merit and promise, have changed the way things were being done.
Here's to all the Fun Forkers amongst us -->
> One man's "wacky" is another man's "revolutionary Idea which hits the mark with its intended audience".
In the original Skunk Works, from the description of the P38:
>> Secretly, a number of advanced features were being incorporated into the new fighter including a significant structural revolution in which the aluminum skin of the aircraft was joggled, fitted and flush-riveted, a design innovation not called for in the army's specification but one that would yield less aerodynamic drag and give greater strength with lower mass.
Not in the contract? Not been used before? Weeellll, ok, it worked, we'll buy a few more.
I never did get round to writing my "Project Manager's Guide to Using VSS as an Excuse For Why Your Project is Late". Step 1 was going to be "don't have sufficient disk space", and Step 2 was "don't have backups". (There were several more rules. I have forgotten them now.)
Unfortunately, our IT department had procedures in place to make both Steps 1 and 2 unnecessarily difficult.
... Windows for Workgroups was an upgrade floppy to Win 3.11 because they weren't quite sure if TCP/IP was going replace NetBUI and were fairly clueless about this thing called "The Internet"?
Figure that probably started out as a side-project some techies were tinkering with the network stack.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
