Salon 1

The following are bad ideas that have been used extensively in software engineering, mainly because they are “shortcuts” – methods that are not proper or cogent, but are implemented for the sake of convenience or performance.  Sometimes they are implemented when the programmer has decided to have the application “think” for the user. From a Systems Engineering perspective, these are just wrong. As a coworker once stated, “Performance is the responsibility of the hardware, the software needs to be correct.” In addition, the situation where the computer thinks for the user rather than doing what the user tells it to do, should be limited to very few, well thought-out and critical situations, or quite possibly never.

• Cache - Storing and presenting old data because it takes to long too present more accurate and reliable real time data.
• Cookies – Saving personal data for a website on the computer, especially bad for public computers.
• Remember Me on this Computer (saving passwords) – This violates the fundamental reason for passwords.  And the option is often checked by default on many sites (e.g., Hotmail).
• Multitab Browsers - Because of session beans, these won’t work properly – your session information can get shared between multiple tabs.
• Automatic Updates – Apparently people who still implement this have never had the experience of an application searching and installing updates while they were trying to use it.  Here’s an idea – I tell the software when to look for updates.
• Auto Correction – Who’s driving here, I mean really?! That’s why there is a Spell Check button on many applications. I will spell check and approve when I want to. Thank you.  This is not to be confused with Auto-Completion, which I think is great (example of letting computer help).
• Spaces in File or Directory Names – Although Windows allows it, it can still cause problems in several scenerios.  Ironically, even MS-DOS can’t handle it without quotes.
• Registry – This is spaghetti code for operating systems.  If I were wrong, there wouldn’t be so many registry cleaners out there.  Maybe if it were humanly readable / editable, but that’s probably just asking for trouble.
• Case Indecision - Case Sensitive is OK; Case Insensitive is OK, too;  Case Sensitive Sometimes is pure madness!