That's along the lines of what most programmers do, and each defeat is chipping away at inefficiency. You're doing your part in the greatest productivity revolution in history :)
So something that could be done by anyone with a paper, pen, and the technical know-how to operate a ruler, is now replaced by someone with a specialized domain knowledge that is creating something that will need to be maintained and likely obsolete in a few years. And they call this progress.
Maybe the list is for a public event, and they don't want people to call in or come to the office just to add their names.
Maybe the list got too long and difficult to manage.
Maybe the maintainer of the list wants to search for specific people without scanning the entire list.
Maybe the maintainer wanted to be able to email attendants without manually entering all the names.
I don't know the specifics of the project, so perhaps you're right. My point was not specific to the project; I was simply trying to allude to the fact that you don't have to be writing the software for rocket ships for it to be useful and productive.
However I feel like our "productivity revolution" is for naught, when we still end up working ourselves to death and having no free time to show for it. Whatever happened to "computers will make our lives easier?" For whom? When does it pay off? When does the programmer get to rest?
Step into the 1970s, and try doing some of these things:
- Professional-quality publishing (text, images, printing)
- Sending text/images to your friend in another state
- Looking up any kind of information (Library trip?)
- Buying things that aren't at your local grocer (Mail-order?)
Try this experiment: Spend a week doing everything without a computer. How productive are you, compared to before? How often did you find yourself wishing you had a computer to help you?
Step into the 1970s and not need to do those things. If you had to type stuff on a typewriter, you didn't spend hours picking out a pretty font, you used the one you got: the typewriter font. Nobody cared if your publishing wasn't professional quality, theirs wasn't either. You didn't IM your friends inane updates regarding your current thoughts on whatever Sarah Palin said five minutes ago, you sent them actually interesting letters. For that matter, you didn't have 1000 "friends", you had 10 real friends.
When someone asked "Who was that guy, in that movie? You know, the guy?", you didn't look up imdb.com on your smartphone while everyone watches you type on a tiny screen, you said "dunno" and moved on with your life. You didn't spend ten minutes debating between buying the 4ft or 6ft USB cables and finding the best price online because you didn't need to buy USB cables.
Yeah, things have changed, but progressed? Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to go back, but that's more to do with being accustomed to this lifestyle, not because it's particularly better. We do more because we're expected to do more, and we're expected to do more because somebody else started doing more.
"Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat."
And, in the 1970s & 80s, if you were together in a room with your 10 real friends, odds are that at least 9 of them were actively engaged in some form of meaningful social interaction. In 2011, 4 of them would be checking email, texting, twittering on their smartphones, another 3 are playing Angry Birds, 3 are talking about an insipid reality TV show that they watch in order to avoid contemplating their empty isolated existences, and 1 is waxing nostalgic about how, circa 1982, people used to have genuinely meaningful conversations and how intrinsically rewarding that was. Not all that glitters is gold, including technology.
"When someone asked "Who was that guy, in that movie? You know, the guy?", you didn't look up imdb.com on your smartphone while everyone watches you type on a tiny screen, you said "dunno" and moved on with your life."
I specifically remember my godfather running around the house in his underwear yelling "I have shit for brains!" when being proven wrong about a movie after 20 minutes of arguing back and forth.
The elimination of that ritual is a net benefit for society.
The amount of noise also increases with the amount of signal. I guess it's just a matter of how much you can take before you decide that it's too loud.
"You didn't spend ten minutes debating between buying the 4ft or 6ft USB cables and finding the best price online because you didn't need to buy USB cables."
I do specifically remember running around for hours looking for the catalog of office supplies from my local office supply company then spending at least an hour finding the right kind of hanging folders to order (then waiting 6 weeks for delivery).
Repeat that exercise for pretty much everything from power cables to underwear and we're definitely in a better place.
