RE: Status of TKP Project

Scott Meyers wrote:
> Regarding your question, then, my feeling is that the
> fundamental characteristic all keyholes share is the
> imposition of some kind of restriction or constraint on the
> maximum size of something.

Where "size" might also be "number of".  As non-programmers may not
understand that we say size for the number of items as well (size of an
array).

Which brings me to my "negative" comment: I guess we won't see keyholes like
"I cannot buy more than 5 books at the same time" or even "I cannot buy more
than 255USD worth of books", since would be a keyhole with a clear bad
business impact.  What I mean is that need to make it understood that these
keyholes do have a bad effect on business.  And one (probably the best) way
of doing so is to educate the users (rather than the designers) to be able
to identify the keyholes and complain about them.  While a Web designer may
not believe non-Web-designer (Scott Meyers), but he will surely understand
customer demand.  (No offense meant for Web designers, they are just an
example).  And to be able to do this (educate the user) I believe that the
terminology needs to be such that they (the users) understand it fully and
properly - like size might also mean "number of".

Probably the word I was looking for is awareness.  We (you, as the knight of
the round keyhole :-) should build keyhole-awareness into the users mind so
that he can start to bug his software provider(s) about the keyholes,
because he can identify them.  IMHO it is a sure way to convince the authors
of the software. ;-)  If the keyhole is not gratuitous (what a word!), the
software provider will be able to explain the costs involved in its removal.
The trick is to educate the user well enough that he/she will not just "eat"
any bull-byproduct the software author comes up with.  At least for the most
annoying, most frequent keyholes.

WW aka Attila