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by tornadoboy55
3411 days ago
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That's just part of the daily coding jargon. Call it a pet peeve, but it frustrates me intensely when everyone calls their defaults 'sane' (implying others their defaults are not). Such a misused word. Same goes for sensible. Seriously, if you start looking out for these two words, you'll notice how stupidly overused they are.. |
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>(implying others their defaults are not)
This is wrong. The point of "sane defaults" is something along the lines of "first do no harm", a sort of minimal starter where if, in principle, an operator started using it out of box and never ever touched a single configuration file or setting, they might lose out on many features or potential but they'd have something minimally usable and that would in general not cause issues. There isn't necessarily one set of possible sane defaults, but it's not hard to imagine INsane defaults for a lot of software or hardware. This is particularly a big deal with all sorts of products that have security, infrastructure, or safety implications. Networking hardware/software products for example necessarily have a great deal of complexity and flexibility under the hood, but that makes Foot-Gun Syndrome a real issue. So they also generally have minimal default factory settings that aim to ensure that they can in fact be configured, accessed, and won't immediately open any gaping holes, flood the network, etc. A firewall might have "sane defaults" of nothing, or perhaps minimally allowing SSH from the LAN and port 80/443 say. An OS should by default not expose services to the net (this was a real problem at one point).
Sane/sensible defaults acknowledge the fact that most consumer users never touch settings, and that even expert users appreciate having a good basic starting point that they can customize from or reset to. "Everyone" thinks about this because it's a universal problem for any configurable software/hardware.