Is the world coming to an end?

[Walter Bright]

On 4/3/2011 12:20 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> Despite Walters claim that inconsistency is not a bad thing, evidence
> indicates that from the psychology community that consistency and
> affordance is a very good thing for usability.


I meant that inconsistency is not *necessarily* a bad thing.

Successful programming languages are remarkably inconsistent, because people 
like them that way. Completely consistent languages tend to be failures.

Obviously, there's a judgment call about what's a bad inconsistency and what's a 
good inconsistency. A programming language is a mass of principles that pretty 
much all conflict with each other. The art is, for each conflict, deciding which 
principle should matter for that particular case.

Ok, I won't drag out my hoary airplane design analogy this time, but have you 
ever designed a house? It's nothing but conflicting requirements. There is no 
consistency. In fact, as any architect will tell you, a consistent design 
actually looks wrong! Look no further than the Parthenon, which doesn't have a 
straight line anywhere in it, even though it looks straight.