[vlc] Complexity is the enemy of integrity

[PK]

Several persons have recently suggested that vlc would be better if they 
could use it to delete, move, or otherwise change the files it plays.  Or 
if it could go out shopping.  Or answer the phone.  Whatever.

That's mistaken.  It would be a poor idea.  I fear that people who think 
like this have been corrupted by a generation of Microsoft-like outlook: 
that every piece of software should do everything.  But that's not so.

The more functions you add to a program, the more opportunities there are 
for bugs, difficulties, and errors of judgment.  The best software isn't 
the software that includes the most functions: it's the software that shows 
the greatest insight and performs its functions in the simplest, most 
direct, most usable, most economical way.  It omits the unnecessary.  With 
software like that, developers can focus their attention on the software's 
real reason for being, and in the case of vlc that is to play a large 
variety of digital media, and to convert among formats.

Anything else is a distraction and a burden.  As a non-developer (but an 
enthusiastic and grateful user of vlc) I'd rather the developers spend 
their precious attention on playing and converting digital media, not on 
incorporating OS-dependent file-handling functions -- and heaven knows what 
else! -- into software structured to be portable.

So to Arndt, for instance, who writes "I need to look at a video and then 
either delete or move [it] to another folder" I'd say "Fine, but the 
suggestion to do it with vlc is a terrible suggestion.  Let vlc be what it 
is, and delete your files some other way.  You'll live."

djc