Use a little imagination, for crying out loud

We can probably all agree that having software fill in sensible defaults for us is a good thing – it means that we are not forced to type in or browse for directories, file names, what not.

Having said that – in the world of software development it would also be nice if everybody didn’t just blindly accept all the defaults that are offered. One example is translation file names in the Eclipse development IDE. I have yet to see a plugin where the developer did not use the default file name plugin.properties. And while that is a fine name, once you have several hundred files with that same base name it becomes just a tad tedious to sit and squint at long, long file paths that are also almost identical to try to find the one file you need.

This is probably mostly a problem for software translators, since everybody else involved with software development tends to only deal with one or two different plugins at a time. But the poor translators get to translate hundreds of plugins, and thus juggle file lists with hundreds (or even thousands) of these files. So dear developers: have a heart, use your imagination, come up with a new file name once in a while!