Software Quality rant (was Re: Large email account)

[Earl R Shannon]

Hello,

I don't want to sound like I'm defending poorly written software. BUT,
If it doesn't look pretty people won't want to use it. And if no one is
going to use your software, why write it?

Again, I'm not defending insecure and otherwise poorly written software.
I'm saying that users want pretty AND "do what I want" software. And
without users the software is pointless. Do users really know the
difference between CRAM-MD5 and Kerberos? Or even IMAP vs. POP?
But they do know what they think looks cool.

Regards,
Earl Shannon

Michael Loftis wrote:
> 
> 
> --On Tuesday, December 21, 2004 08:53 -0200 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh 
> <hmh at debian.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Simon Matter wrote:
>>
>>> The nice thing about Thunderbird is that it works fine. Same goes for
>>> recent kmail versions. Mulberry and PINE may do it better, but they 
>>> don't
>>> look better.
>>
>>
>> We are talking Unix here (industrial strenght tools, focus on doing 
>> things
>> right, etc) or are we talking "Microsoft-based Professional Software" 
>> here
>> (the "MAIL FROM: a at b.c" crowd)?
>>
>> Not that Thunderbird is that bad.  It is *not*.  But it really saddens me
>> to see more and more developers get caught on the "pretty is more
>> important than functionality" mentality.  This has nothing to do with
>> Thunderbird.
> 
> 
> And I have to agree with Henrique here, and not just because he keeps 
> Cyrus backported for my older Woody installs :)
> 
> Working at a web host we deal with all of the major PHP packages.  I 
> won't name any names, but most of them are pretty poorly written.  
> Riddled with bugs and security holes.  Because they're written to do one 
> thing, look pretty.  Security is bolted on as an afterthought.
> 
> 
> ---
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-- 
Systems Programmer ,Information Technology Division
NC State University.
http://www.earl.ncsu.edu

Anonymous child "Some people can tell the time by looking at the sun,
		 but I have trouble seeing the numbers."
---
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