OCD programmers and backwards compatibility :-).

[Tim]

On Sun, 2007-01-21 at 15:00 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> They think of the computer as their personal playground where they can
> make any whimsical change they like.    Someone who actually had to
> deal with the consequences and breakage would at least throw a symlink
> in the old location for a decade or so.   And there is more to your
> number 3 than you might think.
>
> Anytime you bring up the  damage these  changes cause, you are likely
> to get an answer  like "we don't support that  proprietary package" as
> though maintaining interoperable interfaces constitutes support of
> some particular thing.  It comes across like they do it on purpose to
> break other people's products.

Though, they bitch like mad if something that they depend on got changed
in a similar way.  I had that argument with one programmer years ago.
He made a hell of a fuss in his documentation about how programmers must
play by the rules so other programs work as intended, while also arguing
that he had to break the rules to get his program to work.  He just
could not see what was wrong with that attitude.  My computer does more
than just one thing, all the programs have to co-operate.

It seems that arrogance goes hand in hand with programmers.  After all,
if they didn't think that they could do something better than someone
else, they wouldn't write the program.

-- 
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