This type of attitude is not constructive. Of course I read the documentation. Much more than "copy and paste from the tutorial." I looked at tons of code samples as needed, read blog posts, etc. The limitation wasn't obvious at all.
This reminds me of the attitude that I had to correct in developers that worked for me:
- There is a huge difference between "it works" and "it does what the user expects in a friendly way."
Steve Jobs said that if you need to read a user manual (particularly to do the most vanilla usage of a product), the problem is the product. Not you.
> Steve Jobs said that if you need to read a user manual (particularly to do the most vanilla usage of a product), the problem is the product. Not you.
He's talking about consumer products, not databases that were intended for use by technology experts. There's a big difference there.
The onus is on you to understand the limitations of software before you start using it. You complain that the 32-bit warning doesn't show up in the package manager, but you still should have read the documentation before committing to a new technology. It's that simple.
Is it a flaw that mongo doesn't work well on 32 bit systems? Maybe. Probably.
Is it a flaw that you didn't do the requisite research before committing to a database and subsequently complaining about it? Definitely.
Are you really arguing that you shouldn't have to study documentation? First, blog posts and code samples are not documentation (in this case, at least).
If you were working for me as a developer and had the attitude that you shouldn't have to _thoroughly_ read the manual and notes for something like MongoDB, I'd let you go. Steve Jobs was not a programmer.
You're comparing something like an iPhone, intended for the average Joe, to a complex system intended for developers and especially data architects. Assuming software to be intuitive is a good sign of a bad programmer in my book; any good engineer would never assume anything.
Heck, I learned about error handling in Mongo the first hour I started learning it. Same for the 2Gb limitation of 32-bit. The mongo manual is very well done and also happens to be fully indexed in Google.
In the time you've spent defending yourself here and on your blog, you could have learned how to use MongoDB properly, or just gone and bought a 64-bit computer.
The Jobs quote is only relevant for mass-market consumer technology. Nobody would argue that you should be able to operate an MRI machine or an F-16 fighter plane without reading a manual.
The limitation WAS obvious to a great number of people. It's in the documentation, it's on the download page, and it's posted in several blogs available via google searches.
Beyond that I'm not sure why anyone would run a production system on a 32 bit system anymore. Sure the failing silently part sucks but really this seems much more like a poor deployment then a actual bug in mongodb being the root cause.
that quote is absolutely correct for a consumer product such as a phone, but it's disingenuous to apply it to a highly complex product used entirely for bespoke development, aimed at some of the most technical individuals around.
To be fair, if tutorial is official, it could do a better job on educating about handling error conditions of the operation. Like it or not, but large amount of tutorial readers will do exactly that: copy and paste code without going into depths of what's going on there.
