On Friday 20 February 2009 09:48:22 Dr. Robert Marmorstein wrote:
> > But we as programmers know more than they do. That makes it our
> > responsibility to ensure they win.
>
> This is the second or third time you have said something like this on the
> list.
>
> This attitude really scares me.  This is Microsoft's philosophy, not the
> open source philosophy.  

MS philosophy has nothing to do with being responsible. 

> Programs should not be developed with the idea 
> that users don't know what they are doing and so we need to protect them
> from themselves. 

Ah! That's NOT AT ALL what I said. I never said remove freedom, what I am 
saying is making it harder for the user to shoot himself in the foot. If you 
know what you are doing then by all means. 

> The open source ideal is to design programs that give 
> users lots of options -- even the option to shoot themselves in the foot --
> but provide reasonable default behavior that will work 97% of the time.
>
> In this case, I think being able to disable the "do you really want to do
> this?" dialog is perfectly appropriate and reasonable behavior.  However, I
> do agree that enabling, by default, some kind of automatic backup or
> version control system, would be a reasonable choice.  The user could
> always disable these measures, too, and then delete all their files, but we
> WANT the user to be able to do this.  I can imagine more than one set of
> circumstances in which doing so would be desirable.
>
> --Robert

Exactly. :) I guess it is possible to read the above into it. Enable the user, 
as much as possible! But when you know there's a scenario in which people do 
stupid things then you try to protect them by having something that works 
around the situation and can save the day. Obviously you cannot do that to 
all. 


-- 

Bobby
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