Why aren’t computers programmed to understand that multiple clicks mean “prioritize this” instead of “open many iterations of this process”?
In: Technology
It can’t be done in general case. Imagine you are buying stuff on the internet, you’ve added an item to the shopping list and you want to purchase 10 of them. You press the + button nine times. If the browser interpreted those clicks as just manifestation of frustration, you would probably get more frustrated with the browser, because it didn’t do what you expected.
In some situations programmer might decide that excessive inputs should be discarded, but then they would have to figure out, which inputs are valid and which are not. That decision has to be made case by case and often it’s just simpler to just assume all input is valid.
Prioritization is a tricky thing. One way how to do it would be to give interactive part of the program higher priority. However, the process usually can’t tell the operating system that it must be done with higher priority. It could prioritize within itself, but it other processes are taking up the resources, tough luck.
TL;DR it’s easier to program that way.
Hey, software dev here, that’s just because we’re dumb.
Seriously, make it so that certain programs can’t be launched several times or making it so that interacting with a window grants it more ressources is doable, within the limits of what’s doable with a given machine.
Just bear in mind that adding more different operations on a fairly simple action, say the left click, might make everyday use of computers harder for those less knowledgeable in tech, and that’s something to avoid at all cost, since it reduces the user base, and if devs actually implemented things that made sense to them like that we’d end up with systems only devs could use.
Well they’re already programmed to prioritise instructions in the order they are given.
If a program isn’t loading it’s because the computer is already busy working on things it’s been told to do before.
So if you wanted a computer to check if a program is already running before launching you’re slowing down the startup process by adding an extra step. Not only this but you now need to implement some way of differentiating between a user wanting to prioritise something vs actually opening a second instance.
This also ignores the fact that a computer will be working on lots of different things at any given time. How do you know what to suddenly stop working on to put more processing power into launching something?
Programs are often large sets of instructions and not simply a single command, as such randomly interrupting this can cause fatal errors when it expects an output to something that you’ve now cancelled.
That’s not to say that similar features don’t already exist though. Some programs will spot an already running instance of something and rather than launch a new instance simply draw focus to it.
Because multiple clicks don’t mean “prioritize this.” When you double-click something, you are launching the process. The computer has no way to know that you want something else, and there’s no real way to tell the computer that’s what you want, because it’s already prioritizing it; the process is already launching. It’s working as fast as it can, and it can’t do anything more.
Because it’s already going as fast as it can without repercussion on the system/other programs
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