Ask HN: Most regrettable design decision in computer industry?

12 points by t_hozumi 12 years ago | 12 comments

I think that there is a type of design decision that cause a lot of trouble and trivial benefit. If designers had been aware of problems, the world would have saved tons of time and money.

For example:

Big-Endian and Little-Endian:

The difference of endian forces developers to be careful of target architecture. If early processor vendors had communicated and established which is the standard, there would have been less trouble and no need to invent byte order mark(BOM).

32bit IP address:

Of course it is difficult to judge how many devices will be in the world, but sometimes I have an uneasy feeling about shifting to IPv6. I think that the industry will experience confusion and need to devote much effort than we think.

What do you think is most regrettable design decision in computer industry?

pilom 12 years ago |

There are 2 ways to handle strings: 1. All strings are prepended with a length variable 2. Use a NULL character to represent the end of the string

The Unix guys originally chose option 2. To them it made sense because it used fewer extra bits and it allowed you to do strings of any arbitrary length. Unfortunately, every single buffer overflow bug is because of that decision.

txutxu 12 years ago |

- plain text authentication (FTP, SMTP, etc).

- 2 digits for years of 4 digits

- 32 bits ints for counting dates since epoch

informatimago 12 years ago |

Having a computer industry.

All the other design decisions are not regretable within the context of a computer industry, since they just promote more invoicing. On the contrary, the best thing you can do, is to create more such design decision, so you can charge customers more: to implement those design decisions, to reimplement them in a different language for a different platform, to reimplement them when the new extended version of the design decision becomes necessary, and so on. If you make a good design decision, you're set for life.

IvyMike 12 years ago |

If people would have just agreed about exactly what a 'newline' was, that would have been nice.

jrmenon 12 years ago |

While not directly related to h/w, one of my favorite reads has been "Unix Haters Handbook":

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Note I am a Unix//Linux fan myself, but it was really eye-opening to read that doc. (it also confirmed some of my early suspicions on what I perceived to be various design flaws).

Also the book was released in the early 90s', and since then, some of the issues discussed in it has been fixed in later releases of *BSDs' and Linux.

It is still an enjoyable read :)

LarryMade2 12 years ago |

Non replaceable power adapter-to-laptop cables, they save maybe a buck at most but cost us soo much more in replacement PSUs and fried laptops.

Daylight Savings Time

kineticfocus 12 years ago |

640k

GOTO

Buffer Overflows

DRM

rholdy 12 years ago |

CAPTCHA

pearjuice 12 years ago | |

Because spam allowance is a much better design decision?

rholdy 12 years ago | | |

Since when has CAPTCHA stopped spam?

andyzweb 12 years ago |

null

jonjacky 12 years ago | |

Tony Hoare: "I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. ..."

http://qconlondon.com/london-2009/presentation/Null+Referenc...