Things for which software programmers should be shot

[fitek]

I am normally a pacifist. But stupidity, especially repeated stupidity, is simply unacceptable. Unfortunately in the software world, we are plagued with systems that repeat the same errors over and over again

Comments

[iluvsheep]

Wholly agreed. Although, I must say that I'm guilty of at least #4.

Also, it seems like #3 is a direct consequence of #2. That said, a middle ground is really hard when it comes to documentation, and mostly involves good search/indexing of the documentation that you do write.

[fitek]

Re
documentation, most open source apps are written to do something pretty specific. Some are ridiculously simple to use. Others use cryptic commands and config files. I believe that 80% of users will do just the most basic task, so at least make that really easy. Let's use tomcat as an example. Between 4.x, 5.0 and 5.5, the format for jdbc connectors changed 3 times. Yes, 3, like as many days as the resurrection took. And did they bother to post a code snippet? No. We wasted 5 man days on that at work... And its so basic!