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"Barney Oliver was a good man. He wrote a letter one time to the IEEE. At that time the official shelf space at Bell Labs was so much and the height of the IEEE
by yaih 7y ago
"Barney Oliver was a good man. He wrote a letter one time to the IEEE. At that time the official shelf space at Bell Labs was so much and the height of the IEEE Proceedings at that time was larger; and since you couldn't change the size of the official shelf space he wrote this letter to the IEEE Publication person saying, since so many IEEE members were at Bell Labs and since the official space was so high the journal size should be changed."
- http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
- comex 7y agoWhat is the analogy here? The first guess that came to my mind was the monorepo versus multi-repo debate: since Git can only support repos that are so large (shelf space) without getting slow, you should split up your repos (journal size) even if semantically you would prefer a monorepo. But that would support the point I was making, whereas the obliqueness of your reply makes me think you probably meant to criticize it.
- ric2b 7y agoI think he's comparing the journal to the tool (harder to change, impacts everyone) and the shelf to the problem that only impacts a few organizations but actually a lot of people because those organizations are so large.
- comex 7y agoI guess that makes sense. But if that's the analogy, there's a significant difference between the situations. In that example, there was nothing inherently wrong with the journal's size, other than it not matching Bell Labs' arbitrary choice of shelf layout. Git, on the other hand, would be inherently a better tool if it had better performance on large repos (without sacrificing its suitability for small repos).