The Universe of Discourse


Sun, 31 Jan 2021

Early warning signs of shitty software

Here's a screenshot of menu on the documentation page of a package I'm using. You can see right away that the software is going to be crappy:

screenshot of part of a menu, with links for the following API
functions: notFound, methodNotAllowed, notAcceptable,
proxyAuthRequired, clientTimeout, conflict, resourceGone,
lengthRequired, preconditionFailed, entityTooLarge, uriTooLong,
unsupportedMediaType, rangeNotSatisfiable, expectationFailed, teapot,
badData, locked

Major warning sign: The items are not in alphabetical order. (They are in numeric order, but the numbers are not displayed.)

  • Was alphabetization too hard for these people?
  • Or did they simply not think for one second about who would want to use this menu and how?

    If you are looking up a particular function to find out what it does, you have to do linear search on the list to find the one you want.

    Yes, you could do full-text search on the whole page, but then what is the menu for?

Minor warning sign: But at least they included an API function to generate the frequently-used HTTP 418 I'm a teapot status.

<sarcasm>Clearly a lot of thought here about what really matters.</sarcasm>


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