People go to great lengths to avoid looking stupid. In fact, we learn fairly early on that it is often better to be silent than wrong, and that no advice could be better than bad advice. After all, nothing comes from nothing, but idiocy can have a wide range of dangerous consequences.
However, in the process of creating computer software, some of us seem to have forgotten that fairly simple rule: never make a half-assed attempt at being smart. The software industry is ripe with examples of software systems that not only try to be smart and fail, but fail so miserably that they become bigger pain in the asses than they would've been had they not tried to be smart in the first place.
For some reason, when I'm browing the Web here in Japan with my current setup, the Web is trying to pull clever tricks on me all the time. For example, our favorite search engine, Google. Whenever I access google.com, it automatically redirects me to google.co.jp. I then have to click on a link to go back to google.com. What kind of bullshit is that? If I wanted to go to Google.co.jp, I would've typed that in in the first place. If not, it could've at least learned from it's mistake and not redirected me on subsequent visits to google.com.
The docs on PHP.net do the same thing. If I look up a function using the search engine from the English site, it redirects me to the Japanese page. I assume it's doing that because I'm in Japan, but if I wanted the docs in Japanese, I'll look them up from the Japanese site. Besides, my browser User-Agent clearly shows that "en" is my native language, not "jp".
Both are examples of half-assed attempts at being smart. The way I see it, they might as well have stayed dumb. That is, if I start with the English site, keep me there, instead of assuming that it knows what I want better than I do. The other option would've been to use better judgement. For example, instead of using my physical location, they could use my browser's language. I'll use an English browser no matter where I am and would prefer English, but my dad uses a Japanese browser where ever he is (inside or outside of Japan) and he would prefer Japanese content.
This ties back to one of my rules on writing user friendly programs, which goes like this: users won't miss a feature they don't have, but they'll complain about features that don't work. In other words, if a feature doesn't work perfectly all the time, it might as well not exist. I know this is extreme and somewhat unrealistic. But I think that mentality among programmers would eliminate a large number of cases of failed attempts at being smart.
Posted Thu, May 29, 2003 11:31 by Michael Fagan
See the long Google Introduces Geolocation "Extreme Version" thread on Webmaster World. A google rep (username GoogleGuy) comments in there too.
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