4 ms·

The problem with this rationale is that it's how you end up with stuff like this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimm

The problem with this rationale is that it's how you end up with stuff like this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man... Easter eggs can get invoked in unintuitive ways and as a result can cause serious issues. Sure you can make easter eggs that are "safe" but the mental overhead to doing so just is absolutely not worth it for anything that could potentially end up in a security critical or automated path. It's easier to just take a hard line stance and say "I don't want my projects to ever run the risk of losing someone millions of dollars or worse get somebody injured/killed because we decided to add an unnecessary joke".

jjoonathan 5y ago
That's the best example you can come up with? A bug in an easter egg broke a test related to manuals? See, I think security and reliability are good arguments for minimalism and that minimalism is a reason to get rid of easter eggs -- I just think that in most applications nobody gives one genuine whit about minimalism, except as a universal argument of last resort to kill an otherwise completely unobjectionable feature that they don't like. The typical product has a very long tail of dead code and useless features that nobody will ever derive utility or joy from. Easter eggs typically bring a bit of joy, and this actually places them rather far up on the tail. In a land of zeros, a small number stands tall. I fully agree that the overall size of the tail is a problem, but actual attempts to make the tail smaller generally start with lower hanging fruit and still are widely considered a waste of time. Cleanup work is universally valued at close to nothing. Ditto dependency analysis. Nobody thinks twice about roping in heavy dependencies, even in applications that like to think of themselves as important. From the perspective of minimalism, these are all much heavier sins than easter eggs, yet these titanic-sized ships sail silently through the night while one tiny little unobtrusive easter egg that has not in fact caused any trouble will call forth a roiling army of soulless corporate drones, pouring over desks and cubicle walls to wring their wrists, clutch their pearls, and wag their fingers about the possibility that the easter egg may contain a bug.
- CuriousCosmic 5y ago
  That was just the first link I had on hand and I do agree it was fairly innocuous but at least in my line of work, if something like that was to be discovered in a tool, it'd cause all kinds of problems and we'd have to do a full security audit. I personally like the idea of easter eggs but I just think they are too difficult to do safely in command line tools. Graphical tools are generally fine provided the code running is isolated from anything dealing with a hostile network or safety critical environment. I agree that tech/sec debt are just as bad if not worse but I can see how they slip past the radar. I personally am in the same ideological boat that these tails should be regularly and expediently dealt with but I think the distinction is that most technical debt seems like it was a good tradeoff at the time while there's never a good justification for easter eggs past "fun". I guess I fall into the category of crotchety SW dev but I find it's easier to defend against that future technical debt by just drawing a hard line in the sand and not giving any ammunition towards the unnecessary additions crowd.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Yeah, in a world of politics, having provably low utility is worse than having actually 0 utility. It's a shame.

jjoonathan 5y ago

That's the best example you can come up with? A bug in an easter egg broke a test related to manuals? See, I think security and reliability are good arguments for minimalism and that minimalism is a reason to get rid of easter eggs -- I just think that in most applications nobody gives one genuine whit about minimalism, except as a universal argument of last resort to kill an otherwise completely unobjectionable feature that they don't like. The typical product has a very long tail of dead code and useless features that nobody will ever derive utility or joy from. Easter eggs typically bring a bit of joy, and this actually places them rather far up on the tail. In a land of zeros, a small number stands tall. I fully agree that the overall size of the tail is a problem, but actual attempts to make the tail smaller generally start with lower hanging fruit and still are widely considered a waste of time. Cleanup work is universally valued at close to nothing. Ditto dependency analysis. Nobody thinks twice about roping in heavy dependencies, even in applications that like to think of themselves as important. From the perspective of minimalism, these are all much heavier sins than easter eggs, yet these titanic-sized ships sail silently through the night while one tiny little unobtrusive easter egg that has not in fact caused any trouble will call forth a roiling army of soulless corporate drones, pouring over desks and cubicle walls to wring their wrists, clutch their pearls, and wag their fingers about the possibility that the easter egg may contain a bug.

CuriousCosmic 5y ago
That was just the first link I had on hand and I do agree it was fairly innocuous but at least in my line of work, if something like that was to be discovered in a tool, it'd cause all kinds of problems and we'd have to do a full security audit. I personally like the idea of easter eggs but I just think they are too difficult to do safely in command line tools. Graphical tools are generally fine provided the code running is isolated from anything dealing with a hostile network or safety critical environment. I agree that tech/sec debt are just as bad if not worse but I can see how they slip past the radar. I personally am in the same ideological boat that these tails should be regularly and expediently dealt with but I think the distinction is that most technical debt seems like it was a good tradeoff at the time while there's never a good justification for easter eggs past "fun". I guess I fall into the category of crotchety SW dev but I find it's easier to defend against that future technical debt by just drawing a hard line in the sand and not giving any ammunition towards the unnecessary additions crowd.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Yeah, in a world of politics, having provably low utility is worse than having actually 0 utility. It's a shame.