Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Elaine’s Rule

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What, Google doesn’t know Elaine’s Rule? Named for Elaine Ashton, who runs some of the vital perl.org servers and is generally an all-round worthwhile person in the Perl community:

Just fucking make it easy to install.

Or, as Adam pointed out, you can mix it up a bit:

Just make it fucking easy to install.

Just make it easy to fucking install.

Just fucking make it fucking easy to fucking install.

You get the idea.

(Picture by Julian “Supersnail” Cash, from OSCON 2001.)

That rule breaks down under examination though. “Just” implies that this is the only or perhaps primary consideration. So, “make it easy to install” is more important than any other consideration.

You mean “make it easy to install” should trump “make it play well with the rest of the system”? Uh, no.

You mean “make it easy to install” should trump “make it run in a secure way”? Of course not.

How about “make it easy to install” should trump “make it easy to uninstall or upgrade”? Generally not.

So maybe “make it easy to install” should trump “make it do anything interesting or useful”? Like hell.

The tradeoffs continue, but you get the idea.

So the problem with this “rule” is it presents as an absolute what is really a tradeoff of “easy to install” versus many other factors. On closer examination, the person saying this actually means “Just do exactly what I want with as little effort on my part as possible”. Which, while it may be a good thing to aim for, is a whole different rule.

bignose: Interesting, I never read it that way. I always interpreted it as, “You can do whatever else you want, as long as you also make it easy to install.”

“Make it as secure, interoperable, featureful, and covered in pink sparkles as you like… just make it easy to install!”

Okay. So that is then challenged by making that “do whatever else you want” include things like “break three other programs on the system, just make it easy to install”, or “fail to upgrade cleanly later, just make it easy to install”, or “strip all the interesting functionality, just make it easy to install”, or “leave security holes you could drive a truck through, just make it easy to install”, or …

If the answer to any of those is “Yeah, do anything except that”, then the false simplicity of “Just make it easy to install” is gone.

Making it easy to install without compromising any of the other zillion things a user actually wants is the trick. So there’s no “just” about it, even in the user’s mind, because that user doesn’t want to compromise the other important things.

Elaine’s Law states that making it easy to install trumps most other considerations. PHP ate modperl’s breakfast. Guess what? PHP sucks massively compared to modperl plus frameword-of-choice (Apache::Template, Mason, Embperl, whatever). But it was easy to install and it was easy for shared web hosting companies to support. PHP won.

Elaine’s Law means that no matter how good your stuff is, if it’s hard to install, you lose. Period. No two ways about it, no way no how. Sorry.

(PS.: Kirrily, could you put a notice somewhere on the comment form that mentions that comments should be Markdown-formatted? The underscore-emphasis caught out both me and Steffen Mueller (in the comments on the last entry).)

Aristotle: Huh, I didn’t even realise that comments were Markdown-ed! I use it for my posts. Let me check the settings. Nope, no options for that. Weird.

I’ll see what I can do. Thanks for the heads-up.