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by cess11 780 days ago
It's not important because there are many quirks to this software, including a Lisp-like programming language. Learning to use it involves internalising many things that aren't common knowledge, which one has to figure out by trial and error, and the manual.

If you are seriously interested in BeeBase you'll be spending hours learning the basics of the Lisp-dialect and GUI toolkit, getting a hangup on that error message means you don't have that kind of interest. Maybe the empathy got in the way of that, I don't know.

And let's say someone makes a patch that implements a new error message that specifies which of the two rules regarding table names has been breached, then what? More complaints about the next quirk? Some other error message? Begging for a Lua-implemented query language because parens lost the syntax wars of yesteryear, describing it as miserable that it isn't already integrated?

1 comments

> And let's say someone makes a patch that implements a new error message that specifies which of the two rules regarding table names has been breached, then what? More complaints about the next quirk? Some other error message?

Yes, this is how software development is done, assuming you like your customers.

Who are you referring to? Is it even someone in this thread?
I was quoting you, using the > sign to refer to what you said directly. I thought the quote was useful to highlight that it can be easy to have a mental disconnect, or even an antagonism, between developers and their stakeholders.
Who exactly are the "customers" and "stakeholders" here?
The people who use the software of the people who write the software. If the word "customers" is triggering, the argument holds just as well as for "users".
Why are you dodging the question? Who are you talking about, and why?

It's not the commenters above that complained about the error message, they aren't users and highly unlikely to ever become users. Instead you've brought in some unspecified other for unspecified reasons.