4 ms·
The reality is that users overwhelmingly prefer "bloat", i.e. feature rich integrated tools. Joel Spolsky explained it many years ago: Sure everyone only use 5%
by goto11 5y ago
The reality is that users overwhelmingly prefer "bloat", i.e. feature rich integrated tools. Joel Spolsky explained it many years ago: Sure everyone only use 5% of the features of Word - but they use different 5%, which is why nobody uses your elegant minimalist bare-bones word processor.
The alternative to "everything but the kitchen sink" software is Unix style "do one thing well" focused tools. Which is fine if you are a programmer who knows how to select and string tools together (with a bit of scripting thrown in) to solve a task.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agosame for search engines. "which is the best mobile in 2021 " or even "how to take screenshot on laptop" to "how to get pregnant".
- southerntofu 5y agoWe could argue the UNIX philosophy could be applied to higher-level problems, in which case GUI pipeline editors could provide feature-richness with very little bloat. I have hopes that structured shell (PowerShell/Nushell) is going to take us in this direction.
- jcelerier 5y agoMoving bloat in separate processes just adds more bloat as now you have serialization/deserialization & RPC everywhere in addition to your features
- southerntofu 5y agoGood point, though i would argue this could be little bloat compared to what we see today. The traditional C ABI is a demonstration that it does not have to have a huge performance impact, though in this specific case at the cost of soundness/safety. Also, with a project like Nushell specifically, it would be very interesting to explore zero-copy piping. Rust's memory model and mutability rules sound very adapted to making such optimizations in a safe way. Some mutating functions may clone the data at some point to mutate it, but for example filtering could be applied by chaining filtering iterators without requiring ownership.
- mhd 5y ago> Sure everyone only use 5% of the features of Word - but they use different 5%, which is why nobody uses your elegant minimalist bare-bones word processor. That still is an insufficient apologia for Word, and paints the wrong picture: 95% of the features that everyone uses are the same, but the remaining 5% are different. Never mind the bloat in the implementation of the 95% and the bad UI of presenting these various features.
- goto11 5y agoI don't think Word or Excel need any "apologia". They are incredibly successful software products which in general are well liked by their users.
- hulitu 5y agoThey are succsesfull because of windows monopoly on enterprise market. Office 2007 was mostly ok. 365 not so. I'm trying very hard to like any of Microsoft's products because my employee force me to use then ( they might be part of a contract). But MS Office is, and has always been a PITA.
- goto11 5y agoTry to take Excel away from business people and watch the rebellion rise.