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I hate almost all software
Ryan Dahl
2011-09-29
It's unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer. At best I can
congratulate someone for quickly and simply solving a problem on top of
the shit that they are given. The only software that I like is one that
I can easily understand and solves my problems. The amount of
complexity I'm willing to tolerate is proportional to the size of the
problem being solved.
In the past year I think I have finally come to understand the ideals
of Unix: file descriptors and processes orchestrated with C. It's a
beautiful idea. This is not however what we interact with. The
complexity was not contained. Instead I deal with DBus and /usr/lib and
Boost and ioctls and SMF and signals and volatile variables and
prototypal inheritance and _C99_FEATURES_ and dpkg and autoconf.
Those of us who build on top of these systems are adding to the
complexity. Not only do you have to understand $LD_LIBRARY_PATH to make
your system work but now you have to understand $NODE_PATH too -
there's my little addition to the complexity you must now know! The
users - the one who just want to see a webpage - don't care. They don't
care how we organize /usr, they don't care about zombie processes, they
don't care about bash tab completion, they don't care if zlib is
dynamically linked or statically linked to Node. There will come a
point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is
greater than the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens
all of this shit will be trashed. We can flush boost and glib and
autoconf down the toilet and never think of them again.
Those of you who still find it enjoyable to learn the details of, say,
a programming language - being able to happily recite off if NaN equals
or does not equal null - you just don't yet understand how utterly
fucked the whole thing is. If you think it would be cute to align all
of the equals signs in your code, if you spend time configuring your
window manager or editor, if put unicode check marks in your test
runner, if you add unnecessary hierarchies in your code directories, if
you are doing anything beyond just solving the problem - you don't
understand how fucked the whole thing is. No one gives a fuck about the
glib object model.
The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user.
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References
1.
https://tinyclouds.org/
2.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3055154
3.
https://deno.land/x/blog
4.
https://tinyclouds.org/feed
