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> Part of being a good developer, I think, is that just because you can't understand why someone wants to do a certain thing doesn't mean that their use case is

> Part of being a good developer, I think, is that just because you can't understand why someone wants to do a certain thing doesn't mean that their use case is invalid. For all intents and purposes, if you fail to make a convincing argument for a use-case to a developer, it is invalid. It's not actionable. An argument could be made for any program to do anything in any possible way, for any number of reasons. Developers need to narrow that possibility space down radically. It would be nice if developers could spend the time really understanding every opinion offered to them, but it's not going to happen. > That's childish and, frankly, entirely expected of Open Source Dev culture, which has a nasty habit of being condescending to users. Doing "customer support" for free to the general public can wear on you. In fairness, can we agree that there are "difficult users" as well?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> For all intents and purposes, if you fail to make a convincing argument for a use-case to a developer, it is invalid. There's a difference between failing to make a convincing argument and the developer willfully refusing to understand the usecase because they do things differently and are arrogant enough to believe that their way must be "the one true right way". That's the problem that plagues open source devs. > Doing "customer support" for free to the general public can wear on you. In fairness, can we agree that there are "difficult users" as well? Of course there are difficult users, that's not what I'm talking about. The use-case asked for by the OP is not even remotely unreasonable, yet nothing was done for 5 years even though it should be trivial. It's just remapping buttons FFS. Instead they were dismissed as an "edge case" and the functionality as something only "power users" would want, and therefore they didn't have to lift a finger. I wish I could say I was surprised, but that's what I've come to expect from modern developers. Users are cattle, best not to anthropomorphize them.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> For all intents and purposes, if you fail to make a convincing argument for a use-case to a developer, it is invalid. There's a difference between failing to make a convincing argument and the developer willfully refusing to understand the usecase because they do things differently and are arrogant enough to believe that their way must be "the one true right way". That's the problem that plagues open source devs. > Doing "customer support" for free to the general public can wear on you. In fairness, can we agree that there are "difficult users" as well? Of course there are difficult users, that's not what I'm talking about. The use-case asked for by the OP is not even remotely unreasonable, yet nothing was done for 5 years even though it should be trivial. It's just remapping buttons FFS. Instead they were dismissed as an "edge case" and the functionality as something only "power users" would want, and therefore they didn't have to lift a finger. I wish I could say I was surprised, but that's what I've come to expect from modern developers. Users are cattle, best not to anthropomorphize them.