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Comment by mwfunk | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there's a more scientific explanation involving cognitive bias and rationality and so on, but all I know is that few phrases send more chills down more spines of experienced developers than "it should be easy, why don't you just..." It's up there with "ship it now, we'll fix it later" and "if we can't agree which way to go, let's just make it an option in the prefs" on the Mount Rushmore of famous last words in software development. I've been burned by it so many times, I literally have to catch myself when I hear those words coming out of my mouth (or anyone's mouth, but I can only be responsible for myself), which they still do sometimes, because I'm just as subject to human nature and cognitive bias as anyone.

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Hey now, the preferences panels of yore were glorious outposts of customization and power-user-centric software. Computing was way more fun back then. Don't lump anti-option sentiment in with those other, far more worrisome things.

That approach to preferences tends to cause combinatorial explosions in your QA department. You can do it if you're careful, but being careful is the opposite of the "then just make it a preference" approach.

I'm not against preferences and lots of options in general when appropriate, I just don't think they're zero-cost. It's like the surprisingly huge difference between a service being "free" vs. "almost free". But anecdotally (I know...) when fundamental differences between developers are resolved as, "let's just do both and make it an option", it's either people assuming that allowing both behaviors either has no cost, or it's a failure to resolve differences that inflicts one of the thousand tiny cuts that will someday overwhelm the code base.

At the same time, I don't want to be dogmatic about anything, those are just general tendencies. Emacs for example is a beautiful example of an almost opposite design. The software is like a computing instrument that the user has to first learn how to play, but the more effort they put in to it, (up to a point at least, and depending on what they want to do) the more they get out of it. Ultimately it depends on what you're trying to accomplish and who your users are.

My /favorite/ is "ship it now, we'll fix it later" or "do it this way now and we will come back and do the better way later" and then never going back.

I've watched a few products "grow" using this method then project managers be surprised when down the line it's all held together with duct tape and chewing gum and a "simple" change is a week of work. There have been a number of times in my past where I have purposefully not suggested or the team decided not to bring up an "option" because we knew it would be abused.

"why don't you just" is called out in Evan's "The hard parts of open source" [0] talk.

He goes into some of the reasons it's a bad phrase and some of the problems behind it. I'd recommend the talk.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4EX4dPppA

Well, "why not just..." is only bad if it's rhetorical; sometimes it's a genuine question: "why not just?"; there usually is a reason, and it's important to find out what that reason is, rather than repeat someone else's mistakes.

But this is right question. It should be easy to replace part of the binary, it should be easy to run several programs at the same time, it should be easy to type on keyboard so computer executes commands.

These are insanely hard problems yet they are solved because someone asked and someone tried.

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