POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Is there such a thing as inherently asinine software design? : Is there such a thing as inherently asinine software design? Server Time
11 Oct 2024 03:15:35 EDT (-0400)
  Is there such a thing as inherently asinine software design?  
From: gregjohn
Date: 28 Dec 2007 08:45:00
Message: <web.4774fd0ead9865dba47c35520@news.povray.org>
I'm an electronic packrat.  One of the things I've collected is every povray SDL
I've ever done, and I think it's incredibly cool that I still have their
original creation dates associated with the file.

One day, for some reason,  some linux application was resetting the created date
to the current date when I copied the files from one directory or media to
another. I was ticked.  I immediately went to complain and ask how to opt-out
of this behavior in the IRC channel for that app.  The one person there, to the
best of my knowledge, fully understood what I was complaining about and implied
I was silly for not wanting it to be that way.  He or she defended the idea
that every time you copied a file, the only date that ever mattered would be
the date-of-copy-to-new-folder.  Asinine!  And a radical change from how
computing has always worked.  (FWIW, my linux system was only engaging in that
behavior for a short time: it's not typical of how linux has worked for me.)

It does raise the question of whether some design questions are just silly.

Now on the other side of the spectrum, I know that in free software,
non-RTFM'ming newbies can be rude.  It's like some beneficient old man puts out
a giant sub sandwich for free at the pool, and nasty kids go up to complain that
he didn't make separate mustard and non-mustard-containing sections.

On the other end, I think that sometimes there's a paradoxical view in free
software of "We're ready for enterprise use," "We're the coolest,"  versus "Who
cares if some a lazy newbie doesn't get it?", "Who cares if this locks out a
work practice used by 25% of our users-- my work practice is better!"


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