On this reddit thread a bunch of people criticized / made fun of the fman file manager and how the author had spent over 3000 hours making it.

Some argued that making a general file manager application was “easy” and the author of fman had spent way too much time making such a simple app.

Yes, you’re wrong. Anyone who goes to make a tool as general and versatile as a file manager deserves huge respect.

Doing a UI prototype for two pane file list that lets you browse files is EASY. Making a file manager that actually helps you manage files is HARD.

Let’s see what needs to be considered when we try to COPY A FILE:

• Cross-platform
• All filesystems
• All OS versions
• Network volumes
• Filename length limits
• Case sensitivity
• Special character encoding
• Handle and report errors
• Detailed progress indicator
• Estimate remaining time
• Pause/resume
• Interactive options to overwrite/skip/ duplicates
• Symlinks
• Hard links
• Correctly copy attributes, even when support varies between src/destination
• Sparse files
• Special files such as /dev/zero
• Block size (20 byte file can use 4KB of disk space)
• Quotas
• Channels
• Compression
• Encryption
• Optimize for SSD/HDD
• Optimize for same-volume and cross-volume, cross-device copies
• Sandboxing

All this must work 100% of the time, on 100% systems, otherwise someone is going to lose their data.

I don’t even know if fman actually takes care of all that, but my point is that I can imagine one could easily spend a good portion of development making JUST THIS and I would consider it a great achievement if it actually worked.

See also: The Door Problem