Interactive scripts (back on topic for once) [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 05:33 am, Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2017-10-06, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> 
>> The reason a daemon usually opens dummy file descriptors for the 0, 1
>> and 2 slots is to avoid accidents. Some library might assume the
>> existence of those file descriptors. For example, I often see GTK print
>> out diagnositic messages.
> 
> I run a lot of GTK programs from the command line, and I would say 90%
> or more of them spew a steady stream of meaningless (to the user)
> diagnostic messages.  That's pretty sloppy programming if you ask
> me...

Indeed.

If you ever start to doubt that the average quality of software is "crap", try
running GUI applications from the command line and watch the stream of
warnings and errors flow by. They range from relatively trivial warnings that
correctly sized icons are missing, to scary looking warnings about
uninitialised pointers.

Developers: why do you bother to log warnings if you're never going to fix the
damn things?

They're probably to busy re-doing working programs from scratch every few
versions, with a brand new "improved" UI (almost invariably including a kool
new design that uses light grey text on an ever so slightly lighter grey
background) and deleting any useful functionality that the lead developer
personally doesn't use, because "nobody uses that".

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.