Surprise is also based on convention.
What could be surprising to you might be just a stroll in the park for others.
In Japan people would be surprised to see others wearing shoes in a house while it's perfectly normal for people of other countries.
Reading the manual is something to prevent surprises and only takes one sentence to explain. I'd go for that any day of the week!
> ... a well designed system wouldn’t do this. ...
A well designed system would be able to explain their decisions and document that somewhere. Perhaps in the manual.
I have a feeling you were waiting to say that for a while. :D
Glad to make your day. You are welcome.
Ultimately we all end up reading the manual. I'd still prefer if I didn't have to remember how a certain C stdlib function works vs. what seems intuitive.
But that's a lost cause with a lot of people. They'll happily point out how "intuitive" differs among different groups of people and all that, merrily missing the point on purpose.
Oh well. At least I found out without locking my self out of my servers.
> Ultimately we all end up reading the manual. I'd still prefer if I didn't have to remember how a certain C stdlib function works vs. what seems intuitive.
Intuitive is highly subjective, it might be intuitive to you, but not for others, and vice versa, and it is part of the job to read the "manual instruction".
> But that's a lost cause with a lot of people. They'll happily point out how "intuitive" differs among different groups of people and all that, merrily missing the point on purpose
What is your point? Are you arguing against documentation? You told me you are not averse to reading the documentation, yet you are complaining about it and bringing "intuition" into this. I am confused. Could you clarify your point?
Every time I say RTFM (like in the case of strtok), I get down-voted. Some tools really cannot be dumbed down, and they should not. I do not know why people have an aversion to reading documentation. It is bad.
In the case of strtok, I am not going to implement my own if strtok does what I want it to do, and behaves how I know it does. Why would I?! Sometimes what I need is strtok, sometimes strsep, sometimes I may use strtok_r.
RTFM
No tool can protect you from your own assumptions about how said tool works.
In other words, prepare for maximum surprise? As a defensive posture in a hostile or random environment, that makes sense.
But as a design approach, most designs go for the “principle of least surprise.”
And that’s how I read the original comment: a well designed system wouldn’t do this. Joke is on them, though, because nobody designed this.
Surprise is also based on convention. What could be surprising to you might be just a stroll in the park for others. In Japan people would be surprised to see others wearing shoes in a house while it's perfectly normal for people of other countries. Reading the manual is something to prevent surprises and only takes one sentence to explain. I'd go for that any day of the week!
> ... a well designed system wouldn’t do this. ...
A well designed system would be able to explain their decisions and document that somewhere. Perhaps in the manual.
2 replies →
I have a feeling you were waiting to say that for a while. :D
Glad to make your day. You are welcome.
Ultimately we all end up reading the manual. I'd still prefer if I didn't have to remember how a certain C stdlib function works vs. what seems intuitive.
But that's a lost cause with a lot of people. They'll happily point out how "intuitive" differs among different groups of people and all that, merrily missing the point on purpose.
Oh well. At least I found out without locking my self out of my servers.
> Ultimately we all end up reading the manual. I'd still prefer if I didn't have to remember how a certain C stdlib function works vs. what seems intuitive.
Intuitive is highly subjective, it might be intuitive to you, but not for others, and vice versa, and it is part of the job to read the "manual instruction".
> But that's a lost cause with a lot of people. They'll happily point out how "intuitive" differs among different groups of people and all that, merrily missing the point on purpose
What is your point? Are you arguing against documentation? You told me you are not averse to reading the documentation, yet you are complaining about it and bringing "intuition" into this. I am confused. Could you clarify your point?
4 replies →
Every time I say RTFM (like in the case of strtok), I get down-voted. Some tools really cannot be dumbed down, and they should not. I do not know why people have an aversion to reading documentation. It is bad.
In the case of strtok, I am not going to implement my own if strtok does what I want it to do, and behaves how I know it does. Why would I?! Sometimes what I need is strtok, sometimes strsep, sometimes I may use strtok_r.
Why would "last one wins" be dumbing down the tool, exactly?
You're doing a big assumption that people are averse to reading documentation.
You are likely downvoted because you prefer to make your opponents look irrational so you can easily defeat them.
Tearing down a straw man is not a welcome discussion tactic around here. Maybe that can help you.
8 replies →