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
In software, you can store stuff that the user doesn’t see right now.
For things that can be undone, either the whole previous thing was stored, or the changes made since a stored thing were stored.
So you either go back to the previous stored things, or undo the changes in order.
For things that cannot be undone, nothing of the previous thing was stored.
Or it was stored then deleted.
Because the developers didn’t deem it important enough to allow the users to reverse these actions. The code might have been designed in a way that makes reversing this action difficult, so the developers decided it wasn’t an important enough feature to invest the time and resources in order to allow it. Meanwhile, Google Sheets developers might have designed the code so that it was easier to implement this feature, so they did.
Auctions are undoable if the programmer has programmed it to be undoable. If it is not programmed to be undoable, the default behaviour would be that the action cannot be undone.
For your excel, even though you can’t ctrl z it back, there’s a longer way to get the sheet back.
https://theexceladdict.com/blog/?p=77
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.”
From a user’s point of view, everything should be undoable.
From a programmer’s point of view, every moment spent making something undoable is time taken away from making something else doable.
Life is compromise…
But the user’s point of view is the correct one.
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