Engineer Thinking

<i>The existence of uncertainty is not an excuse for exposing it to the user.<p>It is software’s responsibility to mask uncertainty and to make the effort to provide a sensible default behaviour.</i><p>This is often a good policy. It's not always a good policy. There are situations where the user better damn well think what it is they want and I have been asked to <i>not default</i> an option to force them to think. This will rarely be the case for a consumer facing app. It's not too uncommon for something like a commodity trading app or a financial call center app where choices can have costly and irreversible repercussions. In these cases, the application should <i>highlight</i> uncertainty and make the effort to provide data to make the correct choice.

Eclipse is near the apex of the problem indicated in the article. I recently had the displeasure of using it, and had a torrid time trying to configure the colors to my preferred grey on black color scheme. Not only are the options for setting colors spread over different areas of the configuration UI, but there were too many "fine detail" choices regarding semantic markup, without there being a clear and obvious way to change the general thrust (i.e. inverting the text contrast scheme). I had to change dozens of settings, as I recall, to end up somewhere close to what I wanted.<p>I had to give up on virtual space in the editor, though.