<story><title>Why Don&apos;t You Use</title><url>https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2022-03-19/why-dont-you-use.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fishtoaster</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised at the ire around this question.  &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#x27;t you do X&amp;quot; is a great way to understand why someone did Y.  A perfectly valid answer might be &amp;quot;X might be better, but Y is fine and it&amp;#x27;s not the highest priority at the moment.&amp;quot;  Or the answer might be any of the dozens Brendan Gregg gave (including &amp;quot;for reasons I can&amp;#x27;t disclose.&amp;quot;). Any of these answers might be illuminating to the asker.&lt;p&gt;Now, admittedly, it&amp;#x27;s very tone dependent.  &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#x27;t you X&amp;quot; can be asked humbly and with a truly inquisitive tone, or with a sneering tone whose obvious implication is that you must be either ignorant of X or too dumb to see its merits.  But in writing, at least, I try to infer the more charitable attitude of genuine curiosity.</text></item><item><author>dasil003</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s something infuriatingly help-vampirish about asking any question of the form &amp;quot;why don&amp;#x27;t you do x?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The pithy answer is because of all the things in the world that someone might propose need doing, I can only do a vanishingly tiny fraction of them.  Even the largest, most profitable company in the world can only do a slightly larger tiny fraction of them.&lt;p&gt;The reason we don&amp;#x27;t do the things you ask about is because we are focused on doing the things which we&amp;#x27;ve prioritized using our best judgement. The idea that we somehow owe an explanation to internet randos about everything we &lt;i&gt;don&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; do is indicative of a personality that must not be allowed anywhere near engineers with work to do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goostavos</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;ve say through enough conferences, the ire is because the question usually isn&amp;#x27;t in good faith. More often than not, it&amp;#x27;s someone with whatever you call the personality defect that leads them to constantly needing to &amp;quot;show how smart they are&amp;quot; to the room full of people by, presumably in their mind, dunking on the speaker with their wildly naive &amp;quot;what didn&amp;#x27;t you do X?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve also say through Q&amp;amp;A sessions where a guy got up to the microphone to recommend books for the guy giving the presentation to read. It was uncomfortable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Don&apos;t You Use</title><url>https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2022-03-19/why-dont-you-use.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fishtoaster</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m surprised at the ire around this question.  &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#x27;t you do X&amp;quot; is a great way to understand why someone did Y.  A perfectly valid answer might be &amp;quot;X might be better, but Y is fine and it&amp;#x27;s not the highest priority at the moment.&amp;quot;  Or the answer might be any of the dozens Brendan Gregg gave (including &amp;quot;for reasons I can&amp;#x27;t disclose.&amp;quot;). Any of these answers might be illuminating to the asker.&lt;p&gt;Now, admittedly, it&amp;#x27;s very tone dependent.  &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#x27;t you X&amp;quot; can be asked humbly and with a truly inquisitive tone, or with a sneering tone whose obvious implication is that you must be either ignorant of X or too dumb to see its merits.  But in writing, at least, I try to infer the more charitable attitude of genuine curiosity.</text></item><item><author>dasil003</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s something infuriatingly help-vampirish about asking any question of the form &amp;quot;why don&amp;#x27;t you do x?&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The pithy answer is because of all the things in the world that someone might propose need doing, I can only do a vanishingly tiny fraction of them.  Even the largest, most profitable company in the world can only do a slightly larger tiny fraction of them.&lt;p&gt;The reason we don&amp;#x27;t do the things you ask about is because we are focused on doing the things which we&amp;#x27;ve prioritized using our best judgement. The idea that we somehow owe an explanation to internet randos about everything we &lt;i&gt;don&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; do is indicative of a personality that must not be allowed anywhere near engineers with work to do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>It’s true. I built a robot intended to be open sourced and reproduced by others. I wrote the entire stack from scratch in Python. People on the forum asked “why didn’t you use ROS?” which is a perfectly valid question. My answer was that at the time I started the project ROS didn’t support Python 3, ROS is in many ways mostly a system for multi process communication which is something Python already does fine, and I wanted to avoid the learning curve of both learning ROS and learning our system. Also, I wanted to see if I could do it and what it would be like.&lt;p&gt;But ROS is indeed a popular framework for robotics, so the question is a reasonable one to ask.</text></comment>