On 1/25/21 6:15 PM, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
I'm also having a little trouble wrapping my head around that argument because of my own experience. For the last 13 years I've worked for dozens of different clients, and each one came with its own constraints. I've had clients that insisted that I use Word and Excel and some other abysmal MS drawing tool that I don't recall at the moment. I've had other clients insisting that I use Jira and Bitbucket which really make work much more difficult than it needs to be. I've had clients insisting that I use Eclipse IDE or some vendor-specific variant of that even when it constantly broke down, lost code, and required reinstallation. I've had one client insisting that I use a Windows box on my desk for a year until I finally got them to let me use Linux, after which my productivity doubled. One of my current nemeses is Slack, which is so much worse than email that it's criminal. Some of these tools are better than others, but all of them are either impediments to getting work done, or they come with baggage that creates impediments to getting work done (like security holes big enough to drive aircraft carriers through).Do you intend these assessments of better/worse for getting work done to be scoped solely to you and your usage of them, or as global assertions that should apply to all potential users of those tools?
More the former than the latter. If I put myself in a position of making decisions for a company with large numbers of employees as to which tools to use, I find that it's a real dilemma. I can come up with good reasons to use almost any of these tools in specific cases, and at least defensible reasons for using some of these tools company-wide. (Though I often find that the people making these choices aren't aware of how much trouble they're creating for some of their employees who have to use the tools.) What I think it says is that the current set of tools available to industry basically suck, and part of the reason that they suck is that many of them try to force the users into particular ecosystems that paint their customers into corners and force them to use poor tools along with the good ones.
IETF is in a slightly different position in that our worker bees
choose us rather than the other way around, and IETF by its very
nature needs to be open to broad participation. And what I think
that implies is trying to let _everyone_ use their preferred tools
as much as is feasible, even if we need some "bespoke" tools to
facilitate that happening.
Which, perhaps, gets into your later point (that I trimmed, whoops) about having standard interfaces as much as possible and letting people use their own preferred tools to access them.
Yes.
Keith
