241–250 of 356 posts
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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?
But the first option is not "this app can't run on your Xbox". It is "This app possibly cannot run after trying to print".
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.
Hello
World!
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>With Word you can't even guarantee that reopening the file on the same computer & version won't change its formatting. Source? This seems utterly bizarre.
Before the new '.docx`, '.xslx', etc. formats, when it was still just .doc, .xsl, etc., the document format was (as I've heard it told) essentially just a memory dump of Word/Excel's state for that document at the time you saved. And since it's easy to imagine that serializing/deserializing such a complex thing might not be always 100% perfectly idempotent, it would indeed happen that just the act of opening a file w…
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
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It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Recently I had to read an old Access file and where I work we still keep Office '97 around for this purpose and it is quite amazing that it installs and works just fine on Win 11, Clippy works just fine, in fact all the other lame-ass things Office '97 does to take over your desktop all still work even if they don't quite visual…
> It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Here's a pretty detailed list: - It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year. - It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in W…
I haven't tried running too many old programs, though, so I have no sense for how common this might be.
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A file that was written in Word '97 did not even open exactly as expected on two different computers 25 years ago. Formatting depended on the installed printer drivers. Good luck with that document today. My LaTeX files from 35 years ago, on the other hand - they just do fine.
>My LaTeX files from 35 years ago, on the other hand - they just do fine. Yeah, because they're plain text. A fairer comparison would be whether they render pixel perfectly as 35 years ago, which I doubt.
A stable file format is the most important difference here, but the text encoding means that small incompatibilities can be solved by a human rather than needing to rely on an upstream maintainer to recognize and explicitly handle your unique situation.
I've learned this as "swallowing errors" and IMO it's a poor practice. Not only does it not solve the issue at hand (you cannot print on an xbox), but it actively hides how broken the software is, which makes bug discovery and testing much harder. This is one thing I like about Go's panic. You're mostly not supposed to use it or recover from it at run time. It serves as a great vehicle to blare loud sirens at testing…
If the user clicks on a print button in an app on the Xbox, and the app crashes (possibly losing some of the user's data), that's a bad experience for the user. Why do that to them just to stick it to the programmer?
And on top of that, now some developer at some company (often not even the person who initially made the bad assumptions about printing) has now been called in on a weekend by their boss to scramble to fix the issue and push out a new release. Why do that to people?
Regardless, also consider the API contract. If the printing API isn't documented to throw any exceptions, and you start doing that, you're breaking the contract. You can't blame the programmer for not considering platforms without printing support; you've documented that API as always returning something without blowing up.
But that's still irrelevant; don't break user code just because you can, or because it's more expedient for you to do so.
Your Go example is completely unrelated; you're talking about making things blow up at testing time, which I agree is the right thing to do. But that's also when you have full control over the code and the testing. If a third-party platform API starts behaving in ways you didn't expect it to behave, that's a whole other thing.
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>It serves as a great vehicle to blare loud sirens at testing time that you (the programmer) screwed up (and that's ok, we all do), and it's time to figure out where and how to fix it :) Right, but if you read the article, the author is talking less about the developer experience and more about the user experience. "blare loud sirens" is great if you're a tester/developer, not so much if you're an end user. When it c…
That is a dangerous assumption. Unless you know a great deal about every possible use case, you can't know the potential ramifications of incorrect output. Proceeding from invalid state (which would often be the result of swallowing errors) is essentially undefined behavior.
On the other hand, we do know what will probably happen if an undocumented exception gets thrown: the app will crash, possibly causing the user to lose data.
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This isn't invalid state. They're not telling the app about a fake corrupt printer, they are using the API contact to represent the truth (there is no printer you can use) in a way the app already has to support
But I was responding to a general statement.
But I think in most cases that just isn't what's going on. An unsupported API that makes a feature not work is just not a big deal. Lack of support, say, for a cryptographic primitive, could be a big deal, so you might choose to handle that case differently.
Microsoft’s MDM APIs will return a 500 (server error) on a VM if you try to get a list of wireless networks, instead of the saner approach of returning an empty list. The same APIs will return a 418 (I’m a teapot) if you mistakenly try to add an already-existing setting, instead of just updating it as one might expect. They get points for originality, but don’t follow the advice in this article.
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It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Recently I had to read an old Access file and where I work we still keep Office '97 around for this purpose and it is quite amazing that it installs and works just fine on Win 11, Clippy works just fine, in fact all the other lame-ass things Office '97 does to take over your desktop all still work even if they don't quite visual…
> It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility. Here's a pretty detailed list: - It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year. - It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in W…