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If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#21

Post by daveoc64 »

Jabrov wrote: post #4

"The idea here is to have the printing functions all behave in a manner perfectly consistent with printing being fully supported, yet mysteriously there is never a printer to print to." This must be satire. Otherwise I can't comprehend how something as infuriating as this could be presented as a good or smart thing to do UX-wise

If the two options are "this app can't run on your Xbox" or "this app runs on your Xbox, but the printing functions don't work and some of the messages are a little weird", which option do you think users would prefer?

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#22

Post by paxys »

FreeFull wrote: post #18
Analemma_ wrote: post #3

I understand the logic here, and I'm aware Microsoft has a large number of convoluted backward-compatibility requirements, but this seems like drinking to solve your problems and just putting off the inevitable hangover. To be clear: what you're doing here is lying to the user and the developer. Maybe that's justified in isolation, but now this lie is one more bit of "hidden state" you have to keep track of in furthe…

As far as alternatives to what the article suggested go, I think the ideal solution would be to have a compile-time error, so the developers never even get as far as having their printing code try to run on the Xbox. And since it's a compile-time error, there doesn't need to be any kind of runtime error handling or cost either.

Except now you have lost the ability to run all the software that cannot be fixed and recompiled for whatever reason.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#23

Post by happytoexplain »

The specific thing the author is suggesting is correct (components should suffer before users do), but I take great offense to their framing. "There may be times where you need to make an API do nothing." "The wrong thing to do is to have the printing functions throw a Not­Supported­Exception." No, no, absolutely no - what the author is describing is a hack to support a shitty client. Yes, you have to do this sometimes. No, it is not normal or generalizable advice.

The way they've worded this betrays the internalization of their suffering as a MS developer.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#24

Post by GMoromisato »

recursive wrote: post #16
Jabrov wrote: post #4

"The idea here is to have the printing functions all behave in a manner perfectly consistent with printing being fully supported, yet mysteriously there is never a printer to print to." This must be satire. Otherwise I can't comprehend how something as infuriating as this could be presented as a good or smart thing to do UX-wise

The alternative is that the app fails to run at all. Doesn't seem like satire to me.

Or worse, crashes at a random spot because it tried to initialize the printer stack.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#25

Post by lucianbr »

subarctic wrote: post #11
lucianbr wrote: post #5

Once upon a time it was considered a great strategy for browsers to make the best effort to display a page, even if the html code had errors. Just try to guess the author's intention as well as you can, and go ahead. Errors are bad. Users don't want errors. I thought we learned from that experience. Apparently not.

What did you think we learned?

That every single behavior that attempts to guess the users's intent becomes a relied upon part of the software, and this over time grows to an impossible amount of cruft.

See this, hilariously hosted also by microsoft: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/funny-sto...

> And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#27

Post by kolektiv »

happytoexplain wrote: post #23

The specific thing the author is suggesting is correct (components should suffer before users do), but I take great offense to their framing. "There may be times where you need to make an API do nothing." "The wrong thing to do is to have the printing functions throw a Not­Supported­Exception." No, no, absolutely no - what the author is describing is a hack to support a shitty client. Yes, you have to do this sometim…

Broadly speaking I agree with you in principle - but in practice over time you come to realise that there are only shitty clients. They might not intend to be, they might not have started out that way, but time is a destructive thing...

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#28

Post by FreeFull »

paxys wrote: post #22
FreeFull wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as alternatives to what the article suggested go, I think the ideal solution would be to have a compile-time error, so the developers never even get as far as having their printing code try to run on the Xbox. And since it's a compile-time error, there doesn't need to be any kind of runtime error handling or cost either.

Except now you have lost the ability to run all the software that cannot be fixed and recompiled for whatever reason.

You could still offer the mocked APIs, but have them be opt-in. Also, having the compiler throw an error doesn't mean that an older, already compiled executable won't work.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#29

Post by forrestthewoods »

> Well, the wrong thing to do is to have the printing functions throw a Not­Supported­Exception. The app that the user installed on the Xbox was probably tested primarily, if not exclusively, on a PC, where printing is always available. When run on an Xbox, the exception will probably go unhandled, and the app will crash.

Exceptions are such a catastrophically bad idea in almost all cases.

It is absolutely infuriating as a programmer to call a function and not know if it can throw and, if it can, not know what it can throw. It’s a disaster.

I so desperately wish that C++ had Rust’s Result type and pattern matching. std::optional and std::expected are kinda sorta ok, but you really want compiler enforced pattern matching.

What a tragedy.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#30

Post by kentonv »

tsimionescu wrote: post #2

I find nothing quite as frustrating as UIs that suggest a device could exist, but it's not there right now. I then have to spend time to discover that these devices are not supported, and that screen was just some mock someone came up with.

Sure, but you'd be more frustrated if your app just crashed.

If the app is not prepared for printing not being supported, and printing just throws an exception, the app probably just crashes. That's bad.

If the app is prepared for printing not being supported, it should be calling the explicit API to check if printing is supported, and then not displaying the UI for printing if it isn't. The article is not about these apps, it's about what to do about apps that fail to check first.

The bug is with the app, but a good platform does its best to make bad apps work anyway, rather than have them just crash.

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