[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[Mik Clarke]

diablo at best.com wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> > >New ideas come in a lot of packages, and a good number of
> > >them come from people with no clue at all, they have no notion of
> > >"that was tried already".
> >
> > I would actually go so far as to say that clueful people cannot
> > advance the state of the art without the input and assistance of 
> > the clueless.
> 
> I'd have to say I disagree with this. I am going to make a generalized
> statement here which pretty much guarantees I'll think of an exception as
> soon as I send the e-mail, but in no thought-based field in the world do
> the clueless advance the state of the art, whether it be literature, hard
> sciences, social sciences, art, music, etc. Those who are not recognized
> as experts or who are not respected by the establishment in that field
> certainly make contributions, and sometimes very major ones (Einstein for
> instance), but in no cases that I can think of (and that of course is a
> fairly limited data set) do clueless people advance the state of the art.
> I don't see why it should be any different with muds, although I can see
> why it would take less experience to advance the state of the art in muds,
> as it is not a particularly well-developed field.

Well, prehaps cluless isn't the right word.  There are those that know
fantasy books and stories and monsters and ideas and those that know
code. I find that, on occasions, someone with little or no coding skill,
will ask for a feature or funtion that I either would never have thought
of or had filed under difficult/impossible.  Their requests gets me to
think about it and sometimes I find a way to code it that is a lot
cheaper/simpler than I expected.  In a very strong sense, the clueless
have caused the state of my mud base to be advanced in these cases,
simply because they don't know that what thy are asking for is
difficult/impossible.

Mik
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