that’s whacked

forcing the issue

Wednesday, Sep 28. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

I was thinking about user interfaces to all the various commands and utilities I use today, and it amazes me how many programs have a -f, or –force option.

What’s even more astounding is how often I have to use it.

Why? Doesn’t this speak to a more inherent design flaw? Anytime I have to “–force” my program’s behaviour from its normal codepath, then I’m bypassing the program’s logic. This is a concession to the “user always knows best” paradigm. In an ideal world, our software and hardware should act in conjunction to take these kinds of choices away from users. Yeah yeah, the Matrix, blah blah. But seriously, I shouldn’t have to override my program’s default decisions - the program should know what I want.

This is a design flaw that many Unix OS’s suffer from, Solaris included. We have a group, KISS (Keep it Simple Solaris) that is working on this, and other approachability issues. I for one would love to see all these stupid “–force” and “-f” options go away.