In various software there are actions you cannot undo. Most prominent, for me, is deleting a worksheet in Excel – meanwhile in Google Sheets it’s perfectly able to restore a deleted sheet.
In software engineering terms, why do such actions exist? Why is it impossible to undo these actions?
Thanks.
In: Technology
Long story short, such actions don’t exist if they’re not programmed to handle those cases. It does take an extra amount of work and consideration for actions such as tracking what things a user has “deleted”, hiding those things, and keeping them around in case a user actually wants to recover them. Normally, it’s easier to just assume that when a user wants to delete something, we maybe give them a confirmation dialog, but then we don’t think twice about it and truly remove data for what they wanted deleting with no way to get it back afterward.
In general, there’s been a shift of mentalities in how programs should work. Most used to be designed in a sense of “the user read the manual, they should know what they’re doing, we should give them all the power.” to “the user could be drunk for all we know, we shouldn’t let them shoot themselves in the foot if possible.”
Latest Answers