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If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
41–50 of 356 posts
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#42I 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…
So what's your solution then? Break all apps simultaneously that do not have extensive tests for gracefully handling cases that were impossible when they were created?
This is not weird "hidden state" on the implementer's side. It's a straightforward dummy API and all you need to do to test it are a few straightforward asserts that it returns the correct dummy values and doesn't crash.
> I have a feeling that "solutions" like this are part of why an increasing number of my computing problems take the form of, "I tried to take an action, nothing happened. No error, no activity, nothing.", and are impossible to debug or diagnose.
That's precisely not what this is. The whole point of the article is to do nothing correctly. Presenting an empty list of printers is consistent with a PC that simply doesn't have any printers installed. A wrong thing to do would be, for example, presenting a dummy printer that accepts jobs but of course never prints anything.
You don't break the users of your API, period. That shouldn't be controversial. Unfortunately, too many people seem to think they need to do everything over every couple of years only to produce a solution that is no more extensible and resistant to bitrot than the one they're replacing.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#43People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.
I hear that refrain often regarding Microsoft, but with games, I have not had good luck. I resort to using GOG, which itself ends up virtualizing the environment anyway. For example, I do not think anyone would have success installing the original Sim City on Windows 11.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#44People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.
Umm but you can’t find a current version of Word that actually does that. Try it sometime.
Was able to do it just fine with these government files[0,1] I found on Google. Word version 16.82 on Mac (Apple Silicon too).
0: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/Legis/LI/uconsCheck.cfm....
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#45I 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 thes…
To me, a better solution would be for the system to pop up a notification informing the user that printing is not supported on this platform, and then whatever other solution is OK.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#46It's a crap analogy. Why would you expose a printing API on a device without printing support? Just ifdef it out on the build.
How about an app originally designed for iPhone but is running on an iPad? iPhones can make calls, but iPads can't. Sure, a properly designed iPad app wouldn't try to use the phone functionality, but what if the developer is too lazy to develop a dedicated iPad app? Surely a crappy iPhone app running on iPad is better than no app at all?
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#47The 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…
The "shitty client" was written long ago by a company that is out of business. YOUR customers rely on that client, and if it stops working because of a change you made they will blame you.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#48The 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…
If you are building a software platform which has been adopted by more than a handful of developers then you're going to have some shitty apps, in which case you have to do this stuff. Yes, it is completely normal and generalizable to all platforms that have wide adoption and take backwards compatibility at all seriously.
Raymond is behind arguably the foremost exemplar of this (Windows) but the same thing happens in the Linux kernel ABI, glibc, the web platform, Java, and so on.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#49Your ecosystem has gone so complex that you can't test it anymore. So instead of handling errors properly you suggest to implement a convoluted user flow that offers always failing actions (install a printer when there's none available). If that's really the suggestion of product and engineering leadership at MSFT no wonder all their products...err...work as designed.
What is "your ecosystem" here? Part of running a platform is that the code running on it is written by other people, not you, and that your customers will be relying on that code.
When the software your customers are relying on breaks because of a change you made, it doesn't matter whose "fault" it is. It's broken, it broke because of something you did, and you have burned customer trust - not the trust of whoever wrote the software you believe is "wrong" or "to blame", trust of your platform and company.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#50Your ecosystem has gone so complex that you can't test it anymore. So instead of handling errors properly you suggest to implement a convoluted user flow that offers always failing actions (install a printer when there's none available). If that's really the suggestion of product and engineering leadership at MSFT no wonder all their products...err...work as designed.
>Your ecosystem has gone so complex that you can't test it anymore.
An operating system with billion+ install base, and millions of developers tends to be complex. I'm not sure what you're proposing here, have your platform/software be more niche? Somehow get all of them to fall in line?
>So instead of handling errors properly you suggest to implement a convoluted user flow that offers always failing actions (install a printer when there's none available).
How are you going to "handle errors properly" if the publisher of the software in question went out of business?