Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

I of course agree that a focus on high level abstraction with little knowledge of the underlying layers is a very problematic approach to programming. But I see the problem as something very different.

To me the issue are two destructive thoughts patterns, in both developers and users. Developers believe that just because they can make something it deserves to exist. Users believe that just because it exists they are supposed to use it.

I believe there is no better example than the "WordArt" feature in Word. It is something which obviously took a very significant amount of effort on the part of the developers, tens of thousands f man hours I would guess. It is also terrible and nobody should ever use that feature, not a single document ever gains anything from it. Instead of making a title large and bold, the existence of that feature tempts users into making it a wave, with an outline and a shadow, instantly making the document worse.

So much of software just should not exist, so many features should be removed and users need to stop thinking that the existence of something is justification for its use.

"tens of thousands" is a crazy over estimation. The whole point of Microsoft Word is to align stylized text on a canvas. The Word Art feature does not appear to use much, if any, functionality that does have some more mundane purpose elsewhere in the application.

On top of that, I think you may be forgetting how common shitty banners were in the early 90's when this feature first came out. There was a clear market for this feature at the time, and they've only made incremental changes to it since.

I think it is very likely much more time. Fonts are hard and the mere existence of text which doesn't move in a straight line adds enormous complexity. Also don't forget that it's existence requires competitors to implement similar things.

>On top of that, I think you may be forgetting how common shitty banners were in the early 90's when this feature first came out. There was a clear market for this feature at the time

No, I am not forgetting that. I am saying that this exact thought process is why we have so much awful software.

> forgetting how common shitty banners were in the early 90's when this feature first came out.

Oh, indeed. MS WordArt is the bastard quirky daughter of MS Clippy and an animated GIF.-

WordArt makes word stand out. I'm certainly not the only one that some spent hours playing with WordArt as a child. That means I grew up being familiar with word. Maybe it increases the number of users in the long run.

I do not think that matters. It is a feature which should never be used.

>I'm certainly not the only one that some spent hours playing with WordArt as a child.

Exactly that is what I am talking about. It is a totally irrelevant feature, which has exactly zero use to the application itself and only adds a mountain of complexity.

But I mean what I'm saying is people like it I think. It gives some personality to windows. Doesn't that matter?

Can you explain why it should never be used, beyond subjective preference?

As much as I’m agreeable to your general observation, I feel WordArt is a really poor example to illustrate your point: few software features have had such an aesthetic, meaningful, and human impact in the course of the Internet Age.

Oh how I yearn for a world of Geocities and FrontPage over Admiral anti-ad-blocker and GDPR cookie popups.

Yeah it's a baffling example to me. WordArt was really popular! People liked using it! The fact that it has aesthetically gone out of favor, years later, has nothing to do with software quality.

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