Creeping featurism and the ratchet effect
2006-05-19 21:36 - Links
For example, someone is reading the Perl manual. They read the section on the unpack function and they find it confusing. So they propose a documentation patch to add a couple of sentences, explicating the confusing point in more detail.
It seems like a good idea at the time. But if you do it over and over---and we have---you end up with a 2,000 page manual---and we did.
The real problem is that it's easy to see the benefit of any proposed addition. But it is much harder to see the cost of the proposed addition, that the manual is now 0.002% larger.
So, so true. Every person in any way involved in the creation of a software project should know and understand this well.
