Why I Don't Ship Preferences

I got a bad case of vicarious cognitive dissonance from reading this article. At first I thought it was purely me, but the section on his reasoning behind limiting the option space for how long the clipboard history should be showed me, that he basically just doesn't like configuring stuff and will come up with any reason to avoid implementing user configurable options. To clarify: He clearly acknowledges that there are various good reasons for people wanting different behaviour, which generally contradicts his goal of arguing for not shipping preferences. This contradiction at the root of the article never gets resolved, which is what creates the cognitive dissonance, and which makes it almost comical when he arbitrarily limits the clipboard history length to be configurable as a value between 50 and 200. This limit cannot be explained through any of his arguments (like that preferences increase the space of possible states that need to be tested), and so I conclude that it is actually all about the vibes for him - he just doesn't like preferences. And that's ok.