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Of the many recurring stupid ideas for startups I have had is a software company that does not write code. Instead it edits and removes code. This has been ca

by gwu78 10y ago

Of the many recurring stupid ideas for startups I have had is a software company that does not write code. Instead it edits and removes code. This has been called "negative coding." Few people write small programs anymore. UNIX, the OS that runs the internet and on which the "cloud" depends, is a time-capsule full of small programs. What this might mean is left as an exercise for the reader. Today, large programs are celebrated without question. Gratuitous complexity can be disguised as "productivity" and pitched as value creation. At the very least it can be a source of fascination for futurists. Any liabilities created in the process can be easily explained away. Among the many things that can be done with this output, one of them to is to make small programs from the larger ones. As far as I can tell, this is not being done. For myself, I have taken large, open source programs and gutted all the needless features in order to produce the small programs I want. My goal is less complexity. Simplicity is a loaded term. For myself, this process of incrementally reducing complexity "creates value". It is an intellectual exercise, there is a sense of productivity, and yet almost no code is written. Software companies are full of developers who cut, paste and compile. Today many of them are working with open sourced code. The software company I aim to start is comprised of "programmers" who also work with such open sourced code, they only cut and compile. EDIT: Whenever I see the "Who's hiring" thread I always wish I could put in an entry for this. The vision I have is a group of "early employees" with day jobs. Absent connections and name dropping no VC would ever fund this. No one will be paid to do this "negative coding" work until we secure our first government or Fortune 100 contract and they see the results. And even then I could not guarantee the results would be appropriately valued. But were this fictional company to succeed, those early employees could claim they were an integral part of a monumental paradigm shift. EDIT 2: The fictional company does negative coding on single programs to reduce them in size or to break them up into smaller programs and is not limited to the embedded market or driven by resource constraints. Selecting parts of an open source OS distribution to create a new distribution is a different idea and of course many companies have been doing that for many years.

usgroup 10y ago
Shut up and take my money! :)
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  Money doesn't cause this; it's caused by people raised during the microwave generation, and people who don't know about Julia Childs.
AtheistOfFail 10y ago
You know. I like refactoring broken code... You know, just in case you're looking for someone.
newman314 10y ago
I even have a tag line for you: "Do better with less"
- guessmyname 10y ago
  Ironically, that's the jQuery slogan [1]: Write less, do more [1] https://jquery.com/ https://jquery.com/
  - userbinator 10y ago
    ...while relying on more. Using frameworks/libraries often can reduce the amount of code one has to write to perform a certain task, but it also can greatly increase the total complexity of the system. The OP is talking about reducing total complexity, which may mean increasing local complexity slightly.
roymurdock 10y ago
> Of the many recurring stupid ideas for startups I have had is a software company that does not write code. Instead it edits and removes code. This has been called "negative coding." This is prevalent in the embedded OS market with vendors that sell commercial Linux licenses. Many will take a stable Yocto distribution and strip out unnecessary pieces to reduce its weight to suit customer specifications. Often times the OS vendor will then have to go in and add code to meet standard/certification requirements set by the customer. They'll also generally have to add certain libraries and snippets of code for hardware/middleware-specific integration. I'm not an embedded engineer, but from my convos with engineers/execs I have to believe its exceedingly rare that a company could simply strip out pieces from an open source distribution, not add anything proprietary, and sell the resulting code to a customer.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Maybe you should apply to CERIAS's Poly2 that's been getting paid for negative coding for years. ;) http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/poly2/ http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/poly2/ Especially see Section 3.6 of the main paper: https://www.acsa-admin.org/2003/papers/72.pdf https://www.acsa-admin.org/2003/papers/72.pdf It's an old technique of mine, too. Just edit out all that shit so it returns with an error message telling me what the hackers were trying to use with whatever access they got and from where. :)
schoen 10y ago
Google has a big "negative coding" project with BoringSSL, a fork of OpenSSL that tries to remove tons of code: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/10/17/boringssl.html https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/10/17/boringssl.html Seems like it's been a useful concept.
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
This is probably not ok to do, but one of suckless.org's criteria for software that sucks less seems to be fewer lines of code. You might think their software sucks in other obvious ways though. I don't of course; I wouldn't dare.
userbinator 10y ago
Some consultants do the same thing; they might not be always removing code, but it does happen. I personally did some of this in regards to optimisation, it's always fun to see your clients' reactions when you dramatically cut down the resource usage of some massively bloated system they were using.
trprog 10y ago
>gutted all the needless features in order to produce the small programs I want. Which is fine for you to do of course but it is probably inaccurate to assign no value to the code you are removing. Someone took the time to write it. People don't spend their time writing code for no reason. That code may have no value to you personally but it has value to someone.
vu3rdd 10y ago
People who believe in these ideas are a minority, it seems. Every 'aptitude safe-upgrade' tells me that more and more disk space is required to install the packages. OpenBSD project seem to be doing the right thing (as they always did, imho) by deleting a lot of code from the base and not letting it to rot.
neves 10y ago
A personal joke is that when I was young I liked to write code, nowadays I find deleting code much more satisfying. Less code = less complexity, less side effects, less maintenance, and less bugs. Sure, you have to do it without loosing any useful functionality. As a software ages, it becomes bloated, there is a lot of copy'n paste, features aren't useful anymore because the business changed.
gwu78 10y ago
Interestingly, no one mentioned a project like BusyBox.

by gwu78 10y ago

usgroup 10y ago

Shut up and take my money! :)

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
Money doesn't cause this; it's caused by people raised during the microwave generation, and people who don't know about Julia Childs.

AtheistOfFail 10y ago

You know. I like refactoring broken code... You know, just in case you're looking for someone.

newman314 10y ago

I even have a tag line for you: "Do better with less"

guessmyname 10y ago
Ironically, that's the jQuery slogan [1]: Write less, do more [1] https://jquery.com/ https://jquery.com/
- userbinator 10y ago
  ...while relying on more. Using frameworks/libraries often can reduce the amount of code one has to write to perform a certain task, but it also can greatly increase the total complexity of the system. The OP is talking about reducing total complexity, which may mean increasing local complexity slightly.

roymurdock 10y ago

> Of the many recurring stupid ideas for startups I have had is a software company that does not write code. Instead it edits and removes code. This has been called "negative coding." This is prevalent in the embedded OS market with vendors that sell commercial Linux licenses. Many will take a stable Yocto distribution and strip out unnecessary pieces to reduce its weight to suit customer specifications. Often times the OS vendor will then have to go in and add code to meet standard/certification requirements set by the customer. They'll also generally have to add certain libraries and snippets of code for hardware/middleware-specific integration. I'm not an embedded engineer, but from my convos with engineers/execs I have to believe its exceedingly rare that a company could simply strip out pieces from an open source distribution, not add anything proprietary, and sell the resulting code to a customer.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Maybe you should apply to CERIAS's Poly2 that's been getting paid for negative coding for years. ;) http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/poly2/ http://projects.cerias.purdue.edu/poly2/ Especially see Section 3.6 of the main paper: https://www.acsa-admin.org/2003/papers/72.pdf https://www.acsa-admin.org/2003/papers/72.pdf It's an old technique of mine, too. Just edit out all that shit so it returns with an error message telling me what the hackers were trying to use with whatever access they got and from where. :)

schoen 10y ago

Google has a big "negative coding" project with BoringSSL, a fork of OpenSSL that tries to remove tons of code: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/10/17/boringssl.html https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/10/17/boringssl.html Seems like it's been a useful concept.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

This is probably not ok to do, but one of suckless.org's criteria for software that sucks less seems to be fewer lines of code. You might think their software sucks in other obvious ways though. I don't of course; I wouldn't dare.

userbinator 10y ago

Some consultants do the same thing; they might not be always removing code, but it does happen. I personally did some of this in regards to optimisation, it's always fun to see your clients' reactions when you dramatically cut down the resource usage of some massively bloated system they were using.

trprog 10y ago

>gutted all the needless features in order to produce the small programs I want. Which is fine for you to do of course but it is probably inaccurate to assign no value to the code you are removing. Someone took the time to write it. People don't spend their time writing code for no reason. That code may have no value to you personally but it has value to someone.

vu3rdd 10y ago

People who believe in these ideas are a minority, it seems. Every 'aptitude safe-upgrade' tells me that more and more disk space is required to install the packages. OpenBSD project seem to be doing the right thing (as they always did, imho) by deleting a lot of code from the base and not letting it to rot.

neves 10y ago

A personal joke is that when I was young I liked to write code, nowadays I find deleting code much more satisfying. Less code = less complexity, less side effects, less maintenance, and less bugs. Sure, you have to do it without loosing any useful functionality. As a software ages, it becomes bloated, there is a lot of copy'n paste, features aren't useful anymore because the business changed.

gwu78 10y ago

Interestingly, no one mentioned a project like BusyBox.