Top all-time · #3018
Jeffrey Snover
Personal blog · jsnover.com/blogprogrammingcareer
Jeffrey Snover's personal blog at jsnover.com covers programming and career. Since 2014, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jeffrey Snover's blog for the 2011 Monad Manifesto behind PowerShell and for his 2026 posts on Windows app frameworks and Microsoft's software quality. Most links cite it as a source.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Inquiring mind opines...
Most-linked posts?
- Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-03-13
- PowerShell Monad Manifesto [pdf] (2002)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-08
- Welcome to the Room4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-02
- /blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-05-27
- The Physics of Misunderstanding: When "Gaze" Almost Cost Me My Career2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-02-28
What Hacker News says?
Microsoft's software generally gets worse over time. Office 365 Desktop is borderline unusably slow to open. Windows Explorer is, too. Their support is awful. However, .NET gets faster. PowerShell gets faster. PowerShell has a JIT compiler these days for example. > " Another problem is Microsoft is not merging the numbers with actual feedback " That is a problem, I agree. > " So, at the end of the day, the numbers a…
Comment linking /blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/
on “Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork”Submitted Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThe Monad Manifesto mentioned in the podcast: https://jsnover.com/Docs/MonadManifesto.pdf
Comment linking /Docs/MonadManifesto.pdf
on “Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell”Submitted Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWas there a connection to the math/CS concept of "monad", or did Snover intentionally pick a name that would guarantee eveyone would be afraid of it? from http://www.jsnover.com/blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/ > I had had a number of conversations with our team in India where everyone shook their heads and smiled and seemed to get it but then the code clearly demonstrated that they had absolutely no clue what I was…
Comment linking /blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/
on “Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Critic, Is Now Building Azure”Submitted PowerShell Monad Manifesto [pdf] (2002) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSnover specifically set out to design "the next generation platform for administrative automation" in 2002. See the Monad Manifesto : http://www.jsnover.com/Docs/MonadManifesto.pdf And Snover's description of the process almost a decade later: http://www.jsnover.com/blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/
Comment linking /blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/
on “Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Critic, Is Now Building Azure”Submitted Resource Allocation: Race or Rate? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThose who haven't read the Monad (Powershell) Manifesto[1] are doomed to keep repeating Unix's failures. [1] http://www.jsnover.com/blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/
Comment linking /blog/2011/10/01/monad-manifesto/
on “How bad is the Windows command line really?”Submitted Working with Microsoft as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI disagree with pretty much your entire comment. > PowerShell as a scripting language is a major PITA. Well, except this part. > After 2 hours the script would abruptly quit because of some syntax error. 2 hours wasted. As mentioned by another commenter, the PowerShell script is parsed up front, so it probably wasn't a syntax error. My guess is the script lacked error handling and some query or connection to a remot…
Comment linking /Docs/MonadManifesto.pdf
on “PowerShell Inventor Jeffrey Snover Interview”Submitted Monad Manifesto (2002) [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI hesitate to make this sound positive, but to their credit, the leadership at Microsoft who likely steered the weather app towards using the web stack at least correctly identified a major problem: there is not a single good native UI framework for Windows today. Jeffrey Snover, creator of powershell, explained it decently well here: https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-... Was switching to w…
Comment linking /blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/
on “Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM”Submitted Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFrom what I understand, there's now a substantial stack of Windows app frameworks from Win32 to MFC and then 4-6 others that came after. There was a good post covering this last month: https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-... The addition of frameworks like Qt and yes, web wrappers certainly complicates things unless you're presumably deep in it. What isn't clear to me is whether Win32 is stil…
Comment linking /blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/
on “Direct Win32 API, Weird-Shaped Windows, and Why They Mostly Disappeared”Submitted Welcome to the Room as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://archive.today/VEUTN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Snover https://www.jsnover.com/
Comment linking /
on “Jeffrey Snover, creator of PowerShell, retires”Submitted The Last Time Windows Had a Clear Answer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Physics of Misunderstanding: When "Gaze" Almost Cost Me My Career as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Physics of Misunderstanding: When "Gaze" Almost Cost Me My Career as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Time I Asked My Boss: Are You an Idiot? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room" as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Welcome to the Room: A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Welcome to the Room as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monad Manifesto (2002) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Powershell Write-Host Considered Harmful (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted On Becoming a Senior Technical Individual Contributor as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Working with Microsoft as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
