Comments on: Programming Ethics 101

By: LDS

LDS — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:10:27 +0000

“in the absence of any enforcement, almost 90% of people tend to be basically honest.” I am afraid that when it comes to software, the percentage is reversed, especially among home users. I am just looking at a poll about the French decision to cut Internet connectivity to people dowloading illegal copyrighted contents. There’s a perception that stealing “immaterial” goods is not really stealing, especially in some countries where prices are higher (and the average income lower), and the impact on customers higher.
But I agree with everything else – I just had a talk with an HP rep about their latest printer software – a 140MB download full of software useless to me, and with just a little link to the “custom” software installation. And every software you install is happy to install a service and a couple of “run” entries just in case you’re unable to check for updates yourself (hey, wouldn’t you run a two week old version of your printer drivers, would you?) and to enable some rarely used functionalities – never asking you if you need them and agree. Someone is becoming smart enough to use “scheduled tasks” to check for updates (at least you don’t get a process running uselessy all the time), but most developers and project managers are never trained to build well-mannered applications – it’s one of the issue I usually incur when I look at my early developers’s work – their main aim is to make the application work, cost what it may! And often is lack of knowledge about other proper ways to accomplish the same task.

By: TDelphiHobbyist

TDelphiHobbyist — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:08:07 +0000

Excellent article. I’m with JersyGuy with a couple of comments:
1) YOU [software vendor] do NOT decide where software or Start Menu items goes on MY machine.
2) Keep your insignificant CRAP out of my registry! Use an INI or XML file for all the inane little bits that have to be persisted between sessions.
3) If you write to the registry clean up after yourself [delete your root key] when I [and I will ... count on it] remove your software.
Actually I just realized that I’ve got several more so I’ll stop there …

Really enjoyed the read, thanks.

By: JerseyGuy

JerseyGuy — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:57:17 +0000

“When you write a program for someone else to use, the computer they are running it on is their property, not yours”

Amen, Brother! I’m sick of apps that assume they are the sole resident of a machine. Esp apps that do things like install services that run automatically on startup (I’m looking at you, Google and your ‘Update’ service).

By: Mason Wheeler

Mason Wheeler — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:20:15 +0000

Moritz: Interesting article. I hadn’t seen that before. Thanks for the link!

Miki: I’d have to respectfully disagree. The use of garbage collection is the premature optimization here. In fact, it’s a meta-optimization: it optimizes for developer time, instead of anything you’d usually want to optimize for, such as system performance. That makes it even more evil.

By: Miki

Miki — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:45:20 +0000

I love garbage collector, no more stall pointers (theese were nasty bugs), don’t have to think about who will free objects, etc. I think that your argument that GC is bad idea is some sort of early optimization, and we all know that that is a root of all evil.

By: Moritz Beutel

Moritz Beutel — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:32:26 +0000

You’re basically rephrasing Raymond Chen’s six year old post on the topic
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/16/73780.aspx

By: Smasher

Smasher — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:32:21 +0000

Great article! Couldn’t agree more with your main points…