“Professionalism”

Evermore Integrated Office (Chinese: 永中Office) is a cross-platform (closed-source) clone of Microsoft Office. If you are a Linux user and you are familiar with MS Office, you may find it much handier than OpenOffice. (Evermore now allows personal users to use the “15 Day Trial” version for as many days as you wish…)

Actually I tried EIOffice many times, and every time I decided to remove it immediately (except yesterday). Why? At least three reasons:

1. The installation program is not executable. I had to manually run chmod +x.
2. Many directories it installs have permissions 777. Are you kidding? You never learned the ABCs of Unix before releasing something for Linux?
3. The script /usr/bin/eio is poorly coded. The author must be a newbie scripter.

Actually none of them is a big issue, and I can easily get them fixed. (Practically, the third needs no fixing.) I must also admit the software itself is really good; However, these flaws made me think this product was not professional enough.

I have been programming something these days that I plan to release (maybe no earlier than September ’cause I don’t have too much time…) It really is annoying to always follow the many conventions, sane and stupid, reasonable and unreasonable, simply in order to pretend professionalism, such as:

• Use autotools or CMake despite there are only a small number of source files and it is only intended to run on Linux (probably also FreeBSD and/or Solaris, but absolutely no more);
• Insert VIM and Emacs modelines and the GPL copyleft statement in the beginning of every file;
• Choose function and variable names carefully, using prefixes and namespaces;
• Use getopt to parse command line arguments, though my program only accepts three different options;
• Write comments for each and every function and variable, in doxygen style;
• Make things customizable whenever possible, though probably only 1‰ of users will actually change them;
• …

I don’t generally do so when writing programs for personal use, but have to for something to be released. (Some of them are good ideas, of course..) This probably is just like that we are supposed to wear suits instead of T-shirts in an interview. There is no reason – just because most people think it is ‘right’, or most people think most people think it’s ‘right’…

Tags: dev, Office