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From my experience when something like that happens, i.e., HackerNews sends back 10K after an upvote, there is a reason for that. We might not know the reason,
by harel 7y ago
From my experience when something like that happens, i.e., HackerNews sends back 10K after an upvote, there is a reason for that. We might not know the reason, but the developer who did that had one and at the time it was probably a good and valid reason (and might still be).
- krapp 7y ago>We might not know the reason, but the developer who did that had one and at the time it was probably a good and valid reason (and might still be). People seem to assume every aspect of this forum has some brilliant, purposefully elegant rationale behind it, but the truth is PG designed the language (and the forum) to be experimented with and iterated upon, and likely didn't intend the forum to be considered "finished." This software isn't a masters' thesis, it's a proof of concept for a web application in Arc lisp. Unfortunately, a cargo cult mentality has kind of grown up around this forum and every aspect of it is treated as sacred and not to be touched because "there must be a reason for it." The reason is probably that PG didn't care enough to iterate on the first working solution he came up with.
- harel 7y agoVery possible. Also possible there was a valid reason at the time, and even though it's no longer valid nobody bothered to look into it. All I'm saying is that "created" things exist/happen for a reason, which is not always obvious to a 3rd party. I've had this happen with my own code. I find some old code that looks really dumb, no idea why I wrote it like that. I then spend time to refactor it properly, only to hit some obscure edge case which ultimately leads me back to the 'dumb code'