Marshall T. Rose and John L. Romine:
MH.5: How to process 200 messages a day and still get some real work done.


Creeping Featurism

A complaint often heard about systems which undergo substantial
development by many people over a number of years, is that more and more
options are introduced which add little to the functionality but greatly
increase the amount of information a user needs to know in order to get
useful work done. This is usually referred to as creeping featurism.

Unfortunately MH, having undergone six years of off-and-on development
by ten or so well-meaning programmers (the present authors included),
suffers mightily from this. For example, the send command has twenty-five
visible switches, and at least nine hidden switches, for a total of
thirty-four. The poor user who types

         send -help

watches the options scroll off the screen (since the `-help' switch also
lists out four other lines of information). [5] [...]


[5] Recently, this was fixed by compressing the way in which switches
are presented. The solution is only temporary however, as send will no
doubt acquire an endless number of switches in the years to come.