Re: There are two types of programmers...
I largely agree.
In the example of a UI change, the suggestions would normally be accompanied by a detailed description of what is supposed to happen, and when. Some go as far as providing graphical mock-ups.
That’s not a “demanding” suggestion, it’s one where someone is interested and motivated enough to design an improvement to the product, but lacks the technical skills to actually make that change. It takes a surprising amount of effort to define the behaviour of a graphical interface.
I’ve been on both sides of this, and the best results are when the person who made the suggestion and the person who would have to implement it engage in a dialogue to identify the original pain point and remove it in a way that doesn’t create a large amount of additional work for the developer, or create islands of “different behaviours apply here” within the application.
Sometimes, someone will insist that the one thing they use must work the way they want, even if that’s at odds with how everyone else expects, and a danger with the FOSS model is that if that pushy person can write code, then the change tends to get made to the detriment of the consistency of the product. This applies to all kinds of interface, not just GUI - we’ve all seen that one command-switch or API call that doesn’t follow any pattern established by the rest...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
