Dear Log,
I very often am in a situation where I want a "feature" (for lack of a better word that'd
apply to any artifact of design) that's not there, and am left to infer why it's not. It could be
because of many things:
- because the implementation is actually trickier than it seems (possibly because of
some nasty hidden edge cases, which may or may not trouble the designers who want
Everything To Be Perfect Everywhere)
- because of some other obvious good reason that people decided not to implement it,
- because of some other good reason that people decided not to implement it, but I can't
think of what that reason would be
- because of no good reason (of which there are many subtypes; see p5p)
- because everyone else just never thought of it
- because there is no "everyone else" and I'm the only one who's ever actually ever
dealing with this particular system
- or the tricky deadlock one: because everyone else considered all these
possibilities and decided that since the feature isn't already there, it must be
for some good reason that they just can't think of, whereas the feature is absent
simply because everyone has been thinking it's absent for some non-apparent good reason.
- or: the feature actually does exist, but you just can't find it.
In situations like these, it helps to ask around, if possible.
This weekend, however, I was wondering for the Nth time why there's
XML files of all Mozilla/Firefox themes and extensions, but no RSSs of the new
items in those files. I thought it was just that I couldn't find the RSSs. It turns
out that it was because implementation was really hard. Most RSS feed generators
take me only a minute or two
to write, but this Mozilla stuff took me hours. It started out looking simple, but it
was one complication after another.
Therefore in conclusion, delenda est Carthago.
Delenda est
jdporter on 2004-06-13T21:37:06
Hence the term "Carthago-culted software".
