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Sounds like someone had a bad day. Software developers are in a strange position in that they create the world they live in, so any warts seem magnified and se
by dexwiz 10y ago
Sounds like someone had a bad day.
Software developers are in a strange position in that they create the world they live in, so any warts seem magnified and self inflicted. But any significantly advanced discipline is going to be complex. Physics, chemistry, and biology does not have the same luxury of being "rewritable." They operate in the natural world, so you curse God and not Man.
Rewriting a software system from the ground up is nearly impossible. Also any sort of system will need to maintain some level of backwards compatibility, which induces complexity. Thinking about an operating system as something that was built according to a grand design is wrong. They evolve over time, written by different people with different styles solving different problems.
A counterpoint to this argument, "It’s harder to read code than to write it."
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- 0xCMP 10y agoHe is the creator of Node.JS
- ronilan 10y agoTrue. But Maybe he did have a bad day? Like a promise that never resolved or something...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- debt 10y ago"Rewriting a software system from the ground up is nearly impossible." Humans likely won't be tasked with solving that problem in the future though.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoIt's not inherent complexity. It's unnecessary, self-indulgent complexity for the sake of it. My pet theory is that developers don't really want to use tools that aren't complicated, brittle, build systems, because build systems feel like useful machines. There's a certain sense of satisfaction that comes from operating a useful machine with a nice set of relatively simple and predictable built-in problems and challenges. It's a small world and it rains a lot, but you're never going to fall off it, and it's all yours. That satisfaction wouldn't come from a more UX-driven computing paradigm. Especially not one that requires trying to understand what goes on in UserLand - or worse, by inventing a model that reasons like a user. So there's no natural push for other development models coming from inside the community. In spite of the complaints no one - well, hardly anyone - wants to try something different. And no one outside the community understands computing well enough to produce any competition.