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Complexity of adding cutesy icons to our build outputs, configuring WMs and IntelliJ/vim is entirely external to the end product of our work. Those are purely t

Complexity of adding cutesy icons to our build outputs, configuring WMs and IntelliJ/vim is entirely external to the end product of our work. Those are purely the tools we use to view and manipulate our actual work, the source code. It's harmless to the end user. It's also optional, unlike the very real criticism about the complexity of the rest of the ecosystem. What the author wrote about things like Boost, DBus, autoconf etc are exactly the things that threw me off from the C ecosystem and into ecosystems that have their act together to some extent, like C#, Java and Rust.

lmarcos 5y ago
> We collectively decided that Unicode is a thing now (including terminal emulator support), and that emoji are a part of it. That sounds like democracy applied to the IT world, and we all know that "democracy is the least worst system". Democracy doesn't necessarily imply rational thinking; e.g., we are building websites using PHP and WordPress, not Lisp (well, except HN, perhaps). My understanding (probably erroneous) of the article is: we, as developers, are condemned to use not-so-well-designed software because other developers don't know better and keep a) building bad software, b) using bad software. As usual, the majority is the driving force; the question is: are you part of the majority or are you like Ryan? As of me: I'm like Ryan only on Mondays, mostly.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Sorry, I edited my comment. I realised that wasn't what I quite wanted to say. But to respond to your comment, I treat Unicode as a special case, because it is the result of a reform of text encoding from the ground up. Before Unicode, we had proprietary character sets and codepages, mostly mutually unintelligible. Unicode brought order, interoperability, and the ability to represent in digital writing whatever might conceivably need such a representation, now or in a hundred years. It's forwards-extensible, so future cultures and alphabets will be also well-served. I think it's just complex enough for the size of the problem, so it's actually a counter-example of the contrived complexity represented by PHP and WordPress.
  - Matthias1 5y ago
    U+0007 represents the character for ‘make the bell on the teletypewriter ring.’ This isn’t practically used by hardly anyone today, but it remains a part of the Unicode standard and probably will forever. I don’t want to disparage Unicode, because it does provide a good solution to the problem. But it has its own issues and its own degree of complexity. This issue is something I’ve been thinking about lately since since beginning to use Gemini. Gemini is a minimalistic file transfer protocol, like HTTP but for transferring plaintext. But it builds on top of Unicode, of course, and so it inherits all of Unicode’s complexity. Suddenly, the most difficult part for Gemini client authors is not implementing the protocol itself, but correctly handling the complexity of Unicode text rendering. (E.g. https://gmi.skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-07_lagrange-1.6.gmi https://gmi.skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-07_lagrange-1.6.gmi) Obviously, I’m not proposing replacing Unicode. But Unicode is complex, and that complexity ends up being inherited by all projects built on top of it. That’s an example of complexity that’s super easy to miss unless you’re looking for it. Which I think is the original author’s point. Unless you actively try to decrease complexity, complexity only increases.
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      U+0007 represents the character for ‘make the bell on the teletypewriter ring.’ This isn’t practically used by hardly anyone today Sure it is. In some (many?) terminal emulators it makes the screen flash. Some programs use it to signal a significant error has occurred that might be noticed amongst all the blather that command line programs barf of these days.
      - d110af5ccf 5y ago
        A better example might be country flags. When the political situation changes or the flag is redesigned, how should Unicode and the various fonts handle this? Presumably text written in the past shouldn't change for viewers in the future. Unicode mixes abstract concepts and concrete representations together on a number of levels. It seems like a legitimately difficult problem to me though. An 'a' character might be written differently but remains fundamentally the same thing since ancient times. Meanwhile the spelling and meaning of words shifts over time. So how are you supposed to handle pictograms that can change simultaneously in both commonly accepted representation and fundamental meaning? It's also ... weird ... that a TTY bell has a dedicated not-glyph in a writing system, isn't it? Colors are (appropriately, imo) handled via escape codes. I certainly don't want support for HTML flashing text to be added to Unicode! I do appreciate the historical context that led to the current situation though.
d110af5ccf 5y ago
> things like Boost, DBus, autoconf etc Don't the other languages add additional complexity by folding such things in though? If the core system is simple then you will inevitably want to bring in various modules in order to simplify the particular task you're working on right then. Integrating those modules adds its own complexity. Meanwhile, the complexity to support a more advanced core system has to show up somewhere. Someone has to do the complex tasks at some point. For example, in the case of Java even the simplest "hello world" program requires an absolutely enormous runtime environment including the infrastructure for an entire VM.

lmarcos 5y ago

> We collectively decided that Unicode is a thing now (including terminal emulator support), and that emoji are a part of it. That sounds like democracy applied to the IT world, and we all know that "democracy is the least worst system". Democracy doesn't necessarily imply rational thinking; e.g., we are building websites using PHP and WordPress, not Lisp (well, except HN, perhaps). My understanding (probably erroneous) of the article is: we, as developers, are condemned to use not-so-well-designed software because other developers don't know better and keep a) building bad software, b) using bad software. As usual, the majority is the driving force; the question is: are you part of the majority or are you like Ryan? As of me: I'm like Ryan only on Mondays, mostly.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Sorry, I edited my comment. I realised that wasn't what I quite wanted to say. But to respond to your comment, I treat Unicode as a special case, because it is the result of a reform of text encoding from the ground up. Before Unicode, we had proprietary character sets and codepages, mostly mutually unintelligible. Unicode brought order, interoperability, and the ability to represent in digital writing whatever might conceivably need such a representation, now or in a hundred years. It's forwards-extensible, so future cultures and alphabets will be also well-served. I think it's just complex enough for the size of the problem, so it's actually a counter-example of the contrived complexity represented by PHP and WordPress.
- Matthias1 5y ago
  U+0007 represents the character for ‘make the bell on the teletypewriter ring.’ This isn’t practically used by hardly anyone today, but it remains a part of the Unicode standard and probably will forever. I don’t want to disparage Unicode, because it does provide a good solution to the problem. But it has its own issues and its own degree of complexity. This issue is something I’ve been thinking about lately since since beginning to use Gemini. Gemini is a minimalistic file transfer protocol, like HTTP but for transferring plaintext. But it builds on top of Unicode, of course, and so it inherits all of Unicode’s complexity. Suddenly, the most difficult part for Gemini client authors is not implementing the protocol itself, but correctly handling the complexity of Unicode text rendering. (E.g. https://gmi.skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-07_lagrange-1.6.gmi https://gmi.skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-07_lagrange-1.6.gmi) Obviously, I’m not proposing replacing Unicode. But Unicode is complex, and that complexity ends up being inherited by all projects built on top of it. That’s an example of complexity that’s super easy to miss unless you’re looking for it. Which I think is the original author’s point. Unless you actively try to decrease complexity, complexity only increases.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    U+0007 represents the character for ‘make the bell on the teletypewriter ring.’ This isn’t practically used by hardly anyone today Sure it is. In some (many?) terminal emulators it makes the screen flash. Some programs use it to signal a significant error has occurred that might be noticed amongst all the blather that command line programs barf of these days.
    - d110af5ccf 5y ago
      A better example might be country flags. When the political situation changes or the flag is redesigned, how should Unicode and the various fonts handle this? Presumably text written in the past shouldn't change for viewers in the future. Unicode mixes abstract concepts and concrete representations together on a number of levels. It seems like a legitimately difficult problem to me though. An 'a' character might be written differently but remains fundamentally the same thing since ancient times. Meanwhile the spelling and meaning of words shifts over time. So how are you supposed to handle pictograms that can change simultaneously in both commonly accepted representation and fundamental meaning? It's also ... weird ... that a TTY bell has a dedicated not-glyph in a writing system, isn't it? Colors are (appropriately, imo) handled via escape codes. I certainly don't want support for HTML flashing text to be added to Unicode! I do appreciate the historical context that led to the current situation though.

d110af5ccf 5y ago

> things like Boost, DBus, autoconf etc Don't the other languages add additional complexity by folding such things in though? If the core system is simple then you will inevitably want to bring in various modules in order to simplify the particular task you're working on right then. Integrating those modules adds its own complexity. Meanwhile, the complexity to support a more advanced core system has to show up somewhere. Someone has to do the complex tasks at some point. For example, in the case of Java even the simplest "hello world" program requires an absolutely enormous runtime environment including the infrastructure for an entire VM.