Re: helping the user is not an error

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From: Peter da Silva
Subject: Re: helping the user is not an error
Date: 12:24 on 23 May 2006
Oh, geeze, I have a quarter century of hate saved up for programs that 
write to stdout, stderr, or even open up /dev/tty deliberately and spew 
stuff around all my pipelines regardless.

EVERY operating system has hateful equivalents to these...

MS-DOS 2.11, where loading ansi.sys meant that it was MUCH quicker to 
just write to stdout or stderr was actually quicker than calling the 
BIOS even for full-screen apps... and yet people still went around the 
whole file model and hit the BIOS anyway. Then mapped the video memory 
directly and broke horribly on the first multitaskers like DoubleDOS.

AmigaDOS, applications that opened a separate screen instead of opening 
a window in the Workbench, so even though I had an enhanced video card 
that could run 800x600 I had to keep two monitors connected when I was 
using it.

And of course early WIndows apps that were just ports of DOS apps that 
did the same thing on Windows, changing screen resolutions and NOT 
WORKING WITH MY OPTICAL MOUSE because they were trying to install their 
own mouse driver.

Back to the Amiga...  Programs that made their own widgets so they 
ignored the high res text and 3d look I got from patching Intuition to 
take advantage of my video card.

And on Windows that's become pandemic, to the point where finding a 
non-skinned application for some classes of apps is actually 
impossible.

Hate! Don't bloody do it yourself when the OS does a better job!

(even in X11, plain Athena widgets were ugly, but Xaw3d and other 
versions of the library made them look and work much more normally... 
we didn't need a whole new API and Motif and the rest... bastards...)

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