[mythtv-users] "broken" as a synonym for "not as I expected." WAS: Re: mythvideo sort order

[Julius Roberts]

On 20 June 2011 23:25, Robert McNamara <robert.mcnamara at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 6:15 AM, Phil Wild <phil at holobyte.com.au> wrote:
>> Can anyone confirm this same behavior?
>
> People need to stop using the word "broken" as a synonym for "not as I expected."  ;)

No offense intended to Robert, and i know he was joking, but this
comment nonetheless did stick in my head for a few days as not being
quite right.  I was doing some reading and i came upon The Cathedral
and the Bazaar "..Any tool should be useful in the expected way..
..but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected."**.

My point in raising this is that it is all well and good to have
developed complicated software for some fantastic task, but if it
doesn't work the way people might usually expect it to, then that in
my mind is it's not reasonable to blame the user for their poor
perception of the issue.  There's complicated, and then there's just
plain poorly executed.

just my $0.02 worth..

-- 
Kind regards, Jules

[** ]The Cathedral and the Bazaar (abbreviated CatB) is an essay by
Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar