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Re:Opinionated products breed passionate customers by wtallis on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @03:27AM (#33966157)
The idea of "opinionated" software to me seems to have an unfortunate connotation that the user should always adapt their workflow to the one true path favored by the developer. The benign core of that idea is that your project should have a clear sense of purpose, and knowledge of what uses it is and is not suited for—that's praiseworthy.

But the idea of the software being opinionated—and pushing those opinions on the user—sometimes leads developers to ruthlessly strip out any affordances for using it in a way the developer did not intend or anticipate. Developers should be careful to retain at least some degree of humility and not forget that they cannot possibly foresee every practical or interesting use for a product. When you're being "opinionated", you're not just shutting out the users and use cases you're consciously forgoing, you're also shutting out some that are in your blind spots.

Re:Opinionated products breed passionate customers by atoav on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @04:13AM (#33966428)
Think about tools. An opinionated tool is one, where the designer/maker thought about every corner, nook and cranny of the object and decidedly took the decisions that served the higher goal they envisioned for this tool. "Opinionated" does not automatically mean radical, it means that you have that higher goal about what makes a good tool and you are willing to go to certain lengths in reaching it. Sacrificing everything for that higher goal would again be radical, sacrificing nothing for that higher goal (or not having one to start with) is unopinionated. A text editior like vim for example is opinionated – it does not want to be everything to everyone, but it wants to do the things it was intended to do well. Even something simple like Notepad.exe might be opinionated. Just a bare bones simple texteditor, not intended to do anything fancy.

Something like Microsoft Word would be less opinionated, it tries to be a lot of things and is only good in very few of them.

A good screwdriver is opinionated, a weird multitool that is bad at most things while also being clunky is not. A swiss pocket knife is opinionated again. Punk music is opinionated, so is jazz or drum and bass. A certain type of pop music that tries to please everybody is not. And that punk band doesn't automatically get unopinionated, because they add a little dub flavour into their music as long as they still know what they want and why.

In my eyes being opinionated is a good starting point, you then just have to decide whether the thing you decided for is the right opinion for what you are willing to achieve.

Re:Opinionated products breed passionate customers by msla on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @06:19AM (#33967343)
I'm an opinionated person, so I demand my tools share my opinions.

Merely importing the opinions of someone else isn't wrong, it's a phase all children (and, by extension, all learners) go through. As the person develops, they develop their own opinions, backed by experience, which either validate or disprove the opinions of their teachers; in either case, the learner has become mature in their craft, and is ready to impose their opinions on their tools, as opposed to the other way around.

Re:Opinionated products breed passionate customers by wking on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @08:41AM (#33968669)
Could not agree more! This is very well articulated and a point I think I'm going to add into the article.