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.

[mighty-sam.livejournal.com]

A smart, smooth, slick, and lean UI can do wonders, but I agree, so much of it robs too many resources (both computer and human) to be worth it.

Ultimately, the value of a GUI is that it allows some people to see a big picture that cannot do it otherwise. Once it goes beyond that and into bells-and-whistles overload, the benefits are mostly lost, because then the users are grappling with the GUI itself.

My guess is that these are all sorts of software engineers, each championing a different balance of function and form. Like you, I want it useful first, and pretty second.

[johno.livejournal.com]

Perfect name for that sort of thing.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-)

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

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.

Yeah, but that software programmer still needs a paycheck, and there's a limit on how much *actual* software the world needs ....

(I've just been reading a paper on the status of contemporary mathematical "research" -- much of which is, of course, meringue -- but it gets a lot of people tenured -- and hired in the first place. And god knows mathematicians need jobs too.)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Or some not-so-smart person spent a few hours dragging and dropping pretty components and cutting and pasting code :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that software programmer still needs a paycheck, and there's a limit on how much *actual* software the world needs ....

So people should pay him to do something useless, annoying, and wasteful? To waste my time and my disk space? I'd rather fund his education to be a doctor and send him to Tanzania to cure club feet.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that too. Some days I'm amazed at the engineer:QA ratio in most places I've been.