Software meringue

[cjsmith]

Ever see some software feature that's sort of like meringue, or cotton candy? It takes up space but provides nothing? It took a long time to implement and maybe it hurts performance, but its useful content is little or nothing?

I just found another one. I could go on for paragraphs about how annoying it is in its sheer uselessness, and exactly how its very existence is a waste of my resources, but I don't need to pick on anyone in particular. Lots of this is around in lots of places. I'm sure many readers here can think of an example.

It's meringue.

Lots of this seems to show up in UIs. Sometimes I want to stop all user interface implementation until we figure out what UI design is really good for. Each bit of fluff in every software package out there means some smart person somewhere spent a lot of time on that when he could have been doing something useful like improving performance or doing his laundry or even going to an All-Hands meeting.

I wonder if the engineers who implement this sort of thing usually also dislike it. Goodness knows I've had to do a lot of software meringue in my life. It's never very satisfying.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I know that I generally prefer a command line interface to a GUI. I also like to see the commands/messages scroll by in an x-window as a process runs, in addition to having it written to a process log. Graphical displays have their place, especially when I have to keep track of a huge lot of telemetry. But GUI's for the sake of GUI's drive me nuts.