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"papercuts" is a very poor metaphor for this. In the real world, a cut from an edge of a sheet of paper is surprisingly painful (and sometimes briefly a little
by gjvc 4y ago
"papercuts" is a very poor metaphor for this. In the real world, a cut from an edge of a sheet of paper is surprisingly painful (and sometimes briefly a little scary that something so innocuous can cause such injury and pain!), but the body heals the cut in 24 hours or so with no conscious effort. In the software world, one will keep bumping into the defect while remains, and there is no guarantee that it will ever be corrected.
- gfody 4y agoyeah it really seems like he's just talking about bugs. everythings as buggy as the market will bear, which is damn buggy.
- masklinn 4y ago> yeah it really seems like he's just talking about bugs. Inconsistent, and oft very much a matter of opinion. If there's a race condition which causes a loading indicator not to show up it's a bug, but is it a bug if nobody put in a loading indicator because nobody cared, or considered that the operation could take sufficiently long some signal would be useful?
- gfody 4y agothankfully "bug" is not a precise jargon, it can be anything and everything that bugs you. anyone arguing over the definition of "bug" is usually trying to weasel out of having to fix one.
- masklinn 4y ago> anyone arguing over the definition of "bug" is usually trying to weasel out of having to fix one. Meh. It's just as often that they're trying to get something changed against maintenance or stability policy.
- JohnFen 4y agoI think a "bug" is anything that isn't operating as the designers wanted it to. If there's an aspect that just sucks, but is operating as intended, that's not a bug. That's a "misfeature" (or BAD -- Broken As Designed). But a bug doesn't have to be a malfunction. It can be a terrible UI flow or other annoyance. But if it's not what the designers had in mind, it's a bug.
- JasonFruit 4y ago> buggy as the market will bear is a great phrase, and I'll use it.
- masklinn 4y ago> In the software world, one will keep bumping into the defect while remains, and there is no guarantee that it will ever be corrected. This is something which does happen in the real world although I don't know that there's a term for it (hence papercut being used instead, as an unnecessary recurring issue which in the grand scheme of things is not exactly deadly — as opposed to sharp edges, which are usually APIs which are tricky to use). For instance it's common to have bits (of varying sharpness) sticking out of walls and other surfaces onto which things or people will repeatedly snag. Or uneven flooring. They are generally minor annoyances people live with, though they can cause actual harm (falls, wounds).
- tough 4y agomatrix glitches
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoIf it's consistent, it's not a glitch.
- Volundr 4y agoYou clearly haven't used any software I've written.
- dreen 4y agoWe used to call them cherries, because the fix would usually be a single commit to a single file with a handful of lines changed, so it would get git-cherry-picked into the release tag rather than having its own ticket, branch etc
- hgsgm 4y agoThe fixes are cherries.
- civilized 4y agoI agree. Instead, I like to talk about "tripwires" in my work. Some software and data environments are full of tripwires, so it's impossible to move at a brisk pace. Every step must be slow and closely monitored. Because the system does not actually guarantee any of the properties one would reasonably expect it to have, and moving quickly under intuitive (or even explicitly documented) assumptions will quickly lead to an error-riddled, unrecoverable state.
- biscuits1 4y agoI don't know of a "person" who heals papercuts in 24 hours. It's like 24-48 hours of open pain, body identifies the healing spot and places blood toward it. 72-96 hours, basic healing. 144 hours new formed scab. 7-14 days, good enough to function again like it did not happen. and if its located in a high-tension spot (papercuts are always located there like fingers), well then you need band-aids otherwise its recipe for churn. papercuts is perfect for the methaphor. its tension area, high traffic spots. but the author missed the point about super glue (or duct tape, in other authors words)
- unfamiliar 4y agoPeople heal at different rates. Some climbers regularly split their fingertips and they can heal up well enough to climb on again within a couple of days.
- tpoacher 4y agoIts a poor metaphor because you're focusing on the wrong part of the metaphor. It's called a papercut after the "death by a thousand papercuts" chinese torture / execution method. The idea is that a single papercut by itself may not "kill" the project, but collectively they will bleed the project to death out as much as a single massive death-blow. When viewed from this angle, it's a perfect metaphor.