Can Software Have Opinions? I agree with David on this. I think that it can and should. But even so, it would be even better if you could override any functionality you don’t like. This is one of the many things that makes Ruby on Rails resonate with so many people.

This “convention over configurationâ€?, as David calls it, is what inspired me to recently re-factor Retrospect-GDS so that any functionality can be easily overridden in a template module. For something as complex as genealogy software this reduces the number of configuration options, which 99% of people don’t change, from several hundred to just a little over a dozen.