On Sunday 25 March 2001 15:23, guy keren wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Mar 2001, Chen Shapira wrote:
> > This week I found an interesting article about it:
> > http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$308
>
> actually, i have landed on joel's site a few weeks back, and liked
> what he writes. and in what he wrote in this article - he's mostly
> right. however, he's also a bit of an extremist in his writing - read
> a few more of his articles and you'll see.
I disagree with him - I think he picked the wrong definition of
bloatware. Well, perhaps his is what is in the dictionary, but I'm more
concerned about feature-bloat than about disk-space-bloat or even
memory-bloat.
He says that feature bloat is good, because the 80/20 law is wrong. I
think he ignores the obvious - you may say "the linux way", or probably
the "linux distro way".
Take Netscape as a feature-bloated program. It has (a) A browser, (b)
an e-mailer, (c) an NNTP reader, (d) an WYSIWYG HTML authoring tool.
Now, if you build a good, slim browser, and somebody else - or you
yourself - builds a good, slim e-mailser, and so on, then each of the
slim applications is a valuable tool. So, if you wrote a slim word
processor, and it can filter its contents easily to wc, then you solve
the problem for the "journalist" he mentioned, and still keep your
program from reinventing the wheel.
Feature bloat is very annoying, because you can't just take out the 80%
of the software that you don't need. You have cluttered menus (and the
Microsoft evil which is menus that change according to frequency of use
[shudder]), key combinations you have no chance of remembering, and a
huge total load time.
I think good software should be built from slim building blocks, of
which you can use only the ones you need. Another important factor is
integration between the various blocks.
Herouth
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