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"Better products" don't spy on me. As a user, I don't want any information about my usage leaving my machine. In addition to privacy issues, this is now code th

"Better products" don't spy on me. As a user, I don't want any information about my usage leaving my machine. In addition to privacy issues, this is now code that needs to be maintained, discussed, debugged... that has nothing to do with why I'm using the software. It's an entire feature set that costs money and time and technical complexity that provides literally no value to people using the tool for its intended purpose. Software is best when it's designed and built by an expert with an opinion. You can look at things like Linux or vim as an example.

pimterry 3y ago
This is overly reductive. All software - including Linux and vim - makes some choices that benefit the developer over the user. Any choice of technology or software architecture with consideration of developer ergonomics is doing this. Every app that ever shipped with a runtime abstraction (classes, dependency injection, testable code patterns, debug logging, etc) chose to make the software fractionally worse for the user, to help the developers to actually write the software. There is a meaningful and debatable tradeoff in all such decisions, and it's not clear cut. It is often (but not always) sensible for software to include extra code that, yes, must be maintained etc, which exists purely to make the development process of the software more effective. All extra code like this is strictly speaking a bad thing for users when considered in isolation, but overall improvements in development processes (better software, fewer bugs, quicker fixes) mean it's a net benefit for the user in the end, hopefully. In this case, these developers genuinely do think the telemetry will help them build better software. You may not agree! That's an interesting point to explore, but their opinion is that the maintenance cost is worthwhile for the benefits that this information will provide. They think that the downsides of telemetry will be outweighed by the resulting significant improvements for people using the tool for its intended purpose. They may well be totally wrong - there's an interesting balance there that is worth discussing, in terms of concrete benefits and real-world costs. Reducing all DX code to "literally no value" though is unhelpful and misses the real discussion.
- bluefishinit 3y ago
  > This is overly reductive. No, as a user I really don't want my usage data leaving my machine. There is no justification worth that to me.

pimterry 3y ago

This is overly reductive. All software - including Linux and vim - makes some choices that benefit the developer over the user. Any choice of technology or software architecture with consideration of developer ergonomics is doing this. Every app that ever shipped with a runtime abstraction (classes, dependency injection, testable code patterns, debug logging, etc) chose to make the software fractionally worse for the user, to help the developers to actually write the software. There is a meaningful and debatable tradeoff in all such decisions, and it's not clear cut. It is often (but not always) sensible for software to include extra code that, yes, must be maintained etc, which exists purely to make the development process of the software more effective. All extra code like this is strictly speaking a bad thing for users when considered in isolation, but overall improvements in development processes (better software, fewer bugs, quicker fixes) mean it's a net benefit for the user in the end, hopefully. In this case, these developers genuinely do think the telemetry will help them build better software. You may not agree! That's an interesting point to explore, but their opinion is that the maintenance cost is worthwhile for the benefits that this information will provide. They think that the downsides of telemetry will be outweighed by the resulting significant improvements for people using the tool for its intended purpose. They may well be totally wrong - there's an interesting balance there that is worth discussing, in terms of concrete benefits and real-world costs. Reducing all DX code to "literally no value" though is unhelpful and misses the real discussion.

bluefishinit 3y ago
> This is overly reductive. No, as a user I really don't want my usage data leaving my machine. There is no justification worth that to me.