> 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".
The "Linux Distro Way" is a good subject for an MBA thesis.
IMO Its the #1 reason Linux has any market share. Its the only reason I
prefer Linux to Solaris, it is so simple and so great and so successfull.
Having lots of software, preconfigured (usually correct) with tons of
documentation at your fingertips ready for easy installation is the
diffrence between installing a web server with database and running
applications in 30 minutes (Linux) and 2 days (Solaris), installing ftp
server in 5 minutes (Linux) and 5 hours (Solaris).
> 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.
Mozilla has skins and IRC client. :-(
> 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.
I agree that a program should do one thing and do it will.
But I think the core problem here is the definition of "Good, slim X".
I think the only useful browser in the world is IE5. I can't use anything
else. It probably has 100 features I don't need, but nothing else match its
speed.
My friend next cube thinks its bloated, he uses Lynx.
Its all a matter of taste really.
BTW. I never saw a word processor that could pipe. They all read files and
output files from UI.
> 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 can't live without keyboard bindings, and remembering them is easy
compared to remembering tar and find options :-)
Again, matter of taste.
> 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.
I think this is a basic programming dogma:
"Every program is part of a larger program (and rarely fits)
Modern software engneering is built around this concept, and all modern OS
are trying to be a bunch of small building blocks,
Thanks,
Chen.
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