Should you put personal beliefs in your program?
- by TheLQ
Recently I've found two examples of programmer's personal beliefs in programs that have removed or crippled useful functionality
uTorrent using KB (rarely used) vs Kb (what most ISPs and other programs use as their metric) in their current connection speed. Various attempts by others and me to give options to at least give an option to show in Kb have ended with "ISPs should use KB"
Kleopatra (gpg4Win key manager) not having PGP Key Pictures since they "give a false sense of security" and "increase the size of certificates". While the latter is true, the former is debatable.
Both of these hurt the program and its usefulness to me. uTorrent's forums used to be filled with people saying they have 10 Mb download pipe but uTorrent only goes up to 2 MB (not knowing that Mb != MB), and with feature requests to show in Mb. Kleopatra has lost usefulness to me since I don't have the functionality to add pictures to PGP keys.
These all are political statements; developers attempting to make change in, in their minds important, issues. But should this come at a cost to end user functionality? If a programmer heavily believes X but everyone else believes Y, should the programmer refuse to add support for Y because in their mind X is horrible?
In short, should a programmer make political statements in their program?
