I've been wanting to write about usability for a couple of weeks now.
But, not the typical topic of usability in GUIs for average users. I've
been thinking about usability of CLI tools and APIs for power users,
administrators and developers. I don't have all my ideas prepped for this,
so it's not happening today.
However, this article on the (so called) "Properties Pattern" popped up
on my radar and really resonated with me. Since I do a lot of work related
to configuration, to me, it just makes sense to build software that does not
punish me when I want to add or modify values. In addition the pattern adds
ways to talk about inheriting values and such. One thing that I really
liked was how Yegge mentioned that it's very common but not very formal.
I can thing of a number of times at work, and for fun I've done an ad-hoc
sort of subset of this.
This brings me to the next thing I was thinking about, the traditional
engineering trade-off. I think everyone has a bias, whether it is to work
toward performance, or user-facing usability, or flexibility to change the
system. In my case, I think I tend toward the latter cases. I prefer
dynamic languages and having a way to store/fetch configuration without
having to change a lot of code. It might bug other people that it you
can't say for certain that 'foo' will appear somewhere or not, but that is
part of the trade off. I'm not dead set on anything, though, but I like
mulling over this kind of food-for-thought.
On an unrelated note, I don't think I'm going to try to do entries on
Sunday. I think I should just start writing when I have an idea. By the
time I decide it's time to sit down and write an entry, I've already
forgotten some of the things I wanted to write. :-P
