7 ms·

Kids today: want to come along, throw away everything they don't understand, and rebuild what was already there but worse. Accomplishing negative impact.

jplona 4y ago
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ I think this is a human thing, not necessarily just kids today.
- eptcyka 4y ago
  Statistically, I think it'll always be more kids doing this, regardless of day of the week or year of millennia.
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    I think it depends on your experience and what you have gone through, in my case how many of the decisions I've made that looked excellent to me back then, turned out to be okish at most.
  - chasil 4y ago
    Can we actually improve the POSIX shell? Can we reform it, perhaps into a "D-shell," that is an LR-parsed language? AWK had a yacc grammar for many years. Why can't this be the language of the shell, at least for the sake of maintainability and comprehension? https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/code_parsing_posix_s_hell/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/code_parsing_...
    - msla 4y ago
      The problem with making a shell more like a "real" interpreter REPL is the purpose of a shell: Running arbitrary programs not known to the author of the shell, such that any unknown word in a shell script is probably the name of a program as opposed to a misspelled reserved word or variable name. Those programs having arbitrary command-line arguments and having to operate on files with arbitrary names is another complexity.
      - pasc1878 4y ago
        It has been done. See xonsh a python shell which manages the distinction you mention. Also see scsh and rash for scheme Fish for non posix but sane syntax
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        It's interesting to see how so many things grow into each other. A shell is what you say, but there are many efforts to change that. Bash has its magic autocomplete which knows about options of many, many programs. Powershell has an object-model with knowledge of many of its commands.
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      > Can we actually improve the POSIX shell? PowerShell?
      - chasil 4y ago
        No, that won't work. $ ll /bin/dash -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 85368 Jan 5 09:52 /bin/dash If you can make Powershell in a binary that size, then you have a valid point.
        shubhamkrm 4y ago
        But why? Storage is much cheaper today than it was in the 80s. While I myself don’t like huge Electron apps, trying to save every byte of storage is simply not worth it.
        chasil 4y ago
        Embedded applications on smaller systems are why. The POSIX shell is common, from the largest supercomputer down to the smallest ARM. I don't think that there will be any new developments covering that full scope.
        deafpolygon 4y ago
        Embedded systems don't exclude PowerShell from being a replacement for POSIX shells. Maybe embedded systems should not strive to be POSIX.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Many embedded systems hardly have any shell, and even when they do, it isn't bash (which isn't POSIX anyway), rather a tiny subset with the basic tooling for maintenance.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Part of the process of erecting your own identity, both individually and as a generation, involves flatly refusing and denying the practices of your immediate predecessors (eg: your parents' and their generation of men, source code written by programmers before your time, etc.). It's stupid and almost always leads to unintended (and usually negative) consequences, but it's probably something strongly ingrained in our instincts because it rears its ugly head every time there's a generational turnover.
    - incrudible 4y ago
      If you do not understand why this happens, do not call it stupid. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to call it stupid.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        It's stupid in the sense that it's a waste of time and resources. Sooner or later after you've had your fun refusing and denying your predecessors, you realize why they do things the way they do, become wiser, and go back and undo and redo all the fuckery you caused with your refusing and denying. It would be nice if we could get that realization without first having to fuck everything up, y'know?
        WJW 4y ago
        Even in this description you use the words "you realize" and "become wiser" and then describe it as "a waste". It's not a waste, it's just the cost of education. As the saying goes: "good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions". It would be great if we could all come out of the womb with enough education and experience to function as responsible adults in modern society, but we don't. Society (rightfully) allows people some leeway in doing dumb shit so that they can learn firsthand why it's dumb.
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        The experience is absolutely not a waste, don't get me wrong. What I'm calling a waste are the time and resources spent undoing and redoing everything. It's all cute if this just happens during our childhood years, where most actions hold no real consequence. It's when this extends into the real world with very real consequences that it gets really wasteful.
- metadat 4y ago
  Great article. Discussed 13 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 (142 comments)
  - ChrisSD 4y ago
    Some variation on this has been consistently brought up for going on a decade now. At this point it's a HN meme. Its opposite is "cargo culting".
- psychoslave 4y ago
  I like how Chesterton’s Fence example actually is a huge pro to not letting unquestionably the fence in the middle of the road. If there is no documentation on it, no-one around to pro-actively explain why it’s there, then the most economical way to see if it had any positive value is to stash it and see what happen. That doesn’t mean it’s always the most rational thing to do, of course. Throwing POSIX away doesn’t qualify with a situation where there is a lake of provided documentation or a missing obvious purpose. The fallacy is well confined in these two sentences: >However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. Actually, assuming you don’t know consequences of removing the fence, you also have to assume that you don’t know consequences of letting the fence in place, which might just as well turn to a dramatic situation. What is for sure, if nothing around can explain its purpose, is that it was placed here by people to negligent to induce the right clues about it. So, who know to which level their laxity might have reach? Remove the fence unless someone know why it was put up in the first place, and the rational still hold.
  - WJW 4y ago
    Story time: at my previous job we had an old server called "the black box" which hosted some old cronjobs and various services from about a decade earlier. There was no documentation and everyone who had worked on it had left years earlier. The ops team dutifully kept it online but otherwise didn't touch it, and no other team owned it. In short, it was the ideal candidate for your "reverse Chestertons fence" strategy. At some point we had to delve into what was actually on it, and it turned out that both company payroll and a service responsible for about 50% of company revenue was on that box. Simply removing it to see what happened would have easily cost a few million in revenue, even if it could be reinstated from backup a day later (and I'm doubtful if we could have restored it at all without serious data loss). Now obviously having such a server is a bad practice in the first case, but if you find yourself in such a position "just kill it and see what happens" is definitely not the most economical option in all cases. In the case of POSIX it might hold, since probably the worst case is that some volunteers throw away a few years of their life hacking away on yet another OS that will never gain traction. Humanity spends a lot more time on a lot less worthy endeavors.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
loeg 4y ago
It's probably worth noting that the author is in his 50s and is fairly familiar with POSIX (he has been involved in the FreeBSD developer community for decades).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  which makes this garbage even more indefensible.
- drpixie 4y ago
  (smirk) You've noticed that there are lots of kiddies, getting all hot under the collar, who haven't noticed that a counter-example does not refute the global mindset that is Posix ;)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
goodpoint 4y ago
That's been the default for the whole software industry for the last 20 years at least. Reinventing things without learning from the past - and if you point it out people gets so defensive.
simplotek 4y ago
> Accomplishing negative impact. This opinion piece is the epitome of a negative impact work. It's easy to accuse random things of being all wrong, but it's far harder to actually present something you feel is right.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  Not every criticism of something has to be accompanied by a better solution. Pointing out that something has shortcomings is the first step. It’s perfectly fine to say, “That person’s singing is awful,” without also adding, “They need to work on their breath control.” You don’t need to be a great singer to know when someone’s doing a bad job at it. (And many people who are great at what they do are terrible at teaching others to do it, anyway.)
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Criticism without suggestions for improvement is almost always useless.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      Then why do company constantly ask me to "score this phone call", "score this driver", "was this person helpful?", "what did you think of this recommendation?", "could you spend some time to answer this questionnaire what you thought of that widget you bought"? So to me it seems like criticism without suggestions is very valuable, it is called data. Suggestions from amateurs are usually bad and misleading, just highlighting a problem so that the expert can come up with a solution is the most efficient way to work in most cases.
      - rguiliani 4y ago
        [dead]
      - jimbokun 4y ago
        I suspect a lot of that data provides very little value. If you don’t know why the customer was unhappy, what do you change? You can fire the customer service rep, but then what do you do when the next one gets reviews just as bad because they are following the same script?
rstat1 4y ago
and the old folk that created all these things, don't bother to explain them, then get uppity when someone new comes along and doesn't think their creations are perfect. 2 sides of the same coin.
IgorPartola 4y ago
Do you really have to call out the entire JavaScript ecosystem like that? :)
endgame 4y ago
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
DangitBobby 4y ago
It's fun to build stuff. It's not nearly as fun to use and maintain what other people have built. Why should all the fun be for the people who just so happen to have been born decades earlier? The point of life is not to maximize efficiency in all respects, and people make emotional choices to achieve personal fulfillment.
- tlamponi 4y ago
  There's a difference between (re-)building stuff, for fun, learning purpose or even to use in production in your own projects, and dunning-kruger demanding (exaggerated) that existing solutions that provide stable APIs for multiple OS are thrown out, causing a massive amount of forced work (i.e., not fun) to others while getting a worse end result. Also, it can be fun to explore existing ideas and build upon those too - nobody forces you to maintain anything existing "for fun".
  - josephg 4y ago
    My problem with this is that I feel like we (people coming along later) have three options when it comes to designing systems given the existing state of posix / linux / the web / etc: 1. Build inside the ecosystem as it was designed. Eg, make a static webpage using HTML. Make a linux binary using the standard linux tooling + apt (or whatever). This is almost always a good idea when you can, but sometimes the ecosystem is a bit shonky, or misaligned with what you're building. Eg, I want my program to have a fixed execution environment and instead I have debian and macos. I want a react-like API but the browser doesn't provide that. Etc. 2. Build a new thing on top of the ecosystem as it exists. Eg, build docker on top of linux. Build web frameworks. Invent the web browser, or couchdb views, or electron and build your software on top of that. The problem with this approach is that if each generation layers their own rubbish on top of the underlying layers then software will keep getting slower, more complex and more buggy over time. 3. Change the underlying system to work how you want it to work. Instead of using docker on top of ubuntu, replace ubuntu with nixos. Instead of using dpdk for higher storage performance, add io-uring to the linux kernel. I think I would prefer it if more people did option 3 rather than option 2. I think there's lots of ways modern computing systems could be better. I'd rather if linux gained the ability to run binaries from the web (for example) than we invent a new kind of binary in userland (docker containers) and run those. I don't want people in 100 years to still be using linux (with all the bad decisions it contains), but with 10 more layers of different generations' ideas stacked on top. (Oh, its linux - but with docker, and then most people run this specific container to run languageX, and that lets us run electo2050 apps, which in turn you can use to run IRC. It only uses 50 gigs of ram. So small and light!) Option 3 may require us to throw out or deprecate parts of the POSIX API. That may be overdue.
thefz 4y ago
While complaining that Git is haaaard.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Well git is hard tho
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    It's easy if you always do exactly the right thing in the right order and never make mistakes, but if you for example want to undo a git merge[1], god have mercy. [1] https://opensource.apple.com/source/Git/Git-26/src/git-htmldocs/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.txt https://opensource.apple.com/source/Git/Git-26/src/git-htmld...
    - psychoslave 4y ago
      In doubt, I create a new branch from the main one, and test it goes when merging the one holding changes. It something goes wrong, at least the main branch is unaffected. Of course, you must already have some intuition that something could go wrong. :D
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - imetatroll 4y ago
      Reflog lets you see where HEAD has traveled from. Just go back in time. This isn't actually a hard problem to solve. If that sounds difficult just create a branch prior to merging so that you know where to reset your failed branch to.
      - BeeOnRope 4y ago
        They are trying to solve this problem without rewriting the branch.

jplona 4y ago

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ I think this is a human thing, not necessarily just kids today.

eptcyka 4y ago
Statistically, I think it'll always be more kids doing this, regardless of day of the week or year of millennia.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  I think it depends on your experience and what you have gone through, in my case how many of the decisions I've made that looked excellent to me back then, turned out to be okish at most.
- chasil 4y ago
  Can we actually improve the POSIX shell? Can we reform it, perhaps into a "D-shell," that is an LR-parsed language? AWK had a yacc grammar for many years. Why can't this be the language of the shell, at least for the sake of maintainability and comprehension? https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/code_parsing_posix_s_hell/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/code_parsing_...
  - msla 4y ago
    The problem with making a shell more like a "real" interpreter REPL is the purpose of a shell: Running arbitrary programs not known to the author of the shell, such that any unknown word in a shell script is probably the name of a program as opposed to a misspelled reserved word or variable name. Those programs having arbitrary command-line arguments and having to operate on files with arbitrary names is another complexity.
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      It has been done. See xonsh a python shell which manages the distinction you mention. Also see scsh and rash for scheme Fish for non posix but sane syntax
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      It's interesting to see how so many things grow into each other. A shell is what you say, but there are many efforts to change that. Bash has its magic autocomplete which knows about options of many, many programs. Powershell has an object-model with knowledge of many of its commands.
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    > Can we actually improve the POSIX shell? PowerShell?
    - chasil 4y ago
      No, that won't work. $ ll /bin/dash -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 85368 Jan 5 09:52 /bin/dash If you can make Powershell in a binary that size, then you have a valid point.
      - shubhamkrm 4y ago
        But why? Storage is much cheaper today than it was in the 80s. While I myself don’t like huge Electron apps, trying to save every byte of storage is simply not worth it.
        chasil 4y ago
        Embedded applications on smaller systems are why. The POSIX shell is common, from the largest supercomputer down to the smallest ARM. I don't think that there will be any new developments covering that full scope.
        deafpolygon 4y ago
        Embedded systems don't exclude PowerShell from being a replacement for POSIX shells. Maybe embedded systems should not strive to be POSIX.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Many embedded systems hardly have any shell, and even when they do, it isn't bash (which isn't POSIX anyway), rather a tiny subset with the basic tooling for maintenance.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Part of the process of erecting your own identity, both individually and as a generation, involves flatly refusing and denying the practices of your immediate predecessors (eg: your parents' and their generation of men, source code written by programmers before your time, etc.). It's stupid and almost always leads to unintended (and usually negative) consequences, but it's probably something strongly ingrained in our instincts because it rears its ugly head every time there's a generational turnover.
  - incrudible 4y ago
    If you do not understand why this happens, do not call it stupid. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to call it stupid.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      It's stupid in the sense that it's a waste of time and resources. Sooner or later after you've had your fun refusing and denying your predecessors, you realize why they do things the way they do, become wiser, and go back and undo and redo all the fuckery you caused with your refusing and denying. It would be nice if we could get that realization without first having to fuck everything up, y'know?
      - WJW 4y ago
        Even in this description you use the words "you realize" and "become wiser" and then describe it as "a waste". It's not a waste, it's just the cost of education. As the saying goes: "good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions". It would be great if we could all come out of the womb with enough education and experience to function as responsible adults in modern society, but we don't. Society (rightfully) allows people some leeway in doing dumb shit so that they can learn firsthand why it's dumb.
        Dalewyn 4y ago
        The experience is absolutely not a waste, don't get me wrong. What I'm calling a waste are the time and resources spent undoing and redoing everything. It's all cute if this just happens during our childhood years, where most actions hold no real consequence. It's when this extends into the real world with very real consequences that it gets really wasteful.
metadat 4y ago
Great article. Discussed 13 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757 (142 comments)
- ChrisSD 4y ago
  Some variation on this has been consistently brought up for going on a decade now. At this point it's a HN meme. Its opposite is "cargo culting".
psychoslave 4y ago
I like how Chesterton’s Fence example actually is a huge pro to not letting unquestionably the fence in the middle of the road. If there is no documentation on it, no-one around to pro-actively explain why it’s there, then the most economical way to see if it had any positive value is to stash it and see what happen. That doesn’t mean it’s always the most rational thing to do, of course. Throwing POSIX away doesn’t qualify with a situation where there is a lake of provided documentation or a missing obvious purpose. The fallacy is well confined in these two sentences: >However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. Actually, assuming you don’t know consequences of removing the fence, you also have to assume that you don’t know consequences of letting the fence in place, which might just as well turn to a dramatic situation. What is for sure, if nothing around can explain its purpose, is that it was placed here by people to negligent to induce the right clues about it. So, who know to which level their laxity might have reach? Remove the fence unless someone know why it was put up in the first place, and the rational still hold.
- WJW 4y ago
  Story time: at my previous job we had an old server called "the black box" which hosted some old cronjobs and various services from about a decade earlier. There was no documentation and everyone who had worked on it had left years earlier. The ops team dutifully kept it online but otherwise didn't touch it, and no other team owned it. In short, it was the ideal candidate for your "reverse Chestertons fence" strategy. At some point we had to delve into what was actually on it, and it turned out that both company payroll and a service responsible for about 50% of company revenue was on that box. Simply removing it to see what happened would have easily cost a few million in revenue, even if it could be reinstated from backup a day later (and I'm doubtful if we could have restored it at all without serious data loss). Now obviously having such a server is a bad practice in the first case, but if you find yourself in such a position "just kill it and see what happens" is definitely not the most economical option in all cases. In the case of POSIX it might hold, since probably the worst case is that some volunteers throw away a few years of their life hacking away on yet another OS that will never gain traction. Humanity spends a lot more time on a lot less worthy endeavors.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

loeg 4y ago

It's probably worth noting that the author is in his 50s and is fairly familiar with POSIX (he has been involved in the FreeBSD developer community for decades).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
which makes this garbage even more indefensible.
drpixie 4y ago
(smirk) You've noticed that there are lots of kiddies, getting all hot under the collar, who haven't noticed that a counter-example does not refute the global mindset that is Posix ;)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

goodpoint 4y ago

That's been the default for the whole software industry for the last 20 years at least. Reinventing things without learning from the past - and if you point it out people gets so defensive.

simplotek 4y ago

> Accomplishing negative impact. This opinion piece is the epitome of a negative impact work. It's easy to accuse random things of being all wrong, but it's far harder to actually present something you feel is right.

thewebcount 4y ago
Not every criticism of something has to be accompanied by a better solution. Pointing out that something has shortcomings is the first step. It’s perfectly fine to say, “That person’s singing is awful,” without also adding, “They need to work on their breath control.” You don’t need to be a great singer to know when someone’s doing a bad job at it. (And many people who are great at what they do are terrible at teaching others to do it, anyway.)
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Criticism without suggestions for improvement is almost always useless.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Then why do company constantly ask me to "score this phone call", "score this driver", "was this person helpful?", "what did you think of this recommendation?", "could you spend some time to answer this questionnaire what you thought of that widget you bought"? So to me it seems like criticism without suggestions is very valuable, it is called data. Suggestions from amateurs are usually bad and misleading, just highlighting a problem so that the expert can come up with a solution is the most efficient way to work in most cases.
    - rguiliani 4y ago
      [dead]
    - jimbokun 4y ago
      I suspect a lot of that data provides very little value. If you don’t know why the customer was unhappy, what do you change? You can fire the customer service rep, but then what do you do when the next one gets reviews just as bad because they are following the same script?

rstat1 4y ago

and the old folk that created all these things, don't bother to explain them, then get uppity when someone new comes along and doesn't think their creations are perfect. 2 sides of the same coin.

IgorPartola 4y ago

Do you really have to call out the entire JavaScript ecosystem like that? :)

endgame 4y ago

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

DangitBobby 4y ago

It's fun to build stuff. It's not nearly as fun to use and maintain what other people have built. Why should all the fun be for the people who just so happen to have been born decades earlier? The point of life is not to maximize efficiency in all respects, and people make emotional choices to achieve personal fulfillment.

tlamponi 4y ago
There's a difference between (re-)building stuff, for fun, learning purpose or even to use in production in your own projects, and dunning-kruger demanding (exaggerated) that existing solutions that provide stable APIs for multiple OS are thrown out, causing a massive amount of forced work (i.e., not fun) to others while getting a worse end result. Also, it can be fun to explore existing ideas and build upon those too - nobody forces you to maintain anything existing "for fun".
- josephg 4y ago
  My problem with this is that I feel like we (people coming along later) have three options when it comes to designing systems given the existing state of posix / linux / the web / etc: 1. Build inside the ecosystem as it was designed. Eg, make a static webpage using HTML. Make a linux binary using the standard linux tooling + apt (or whatever). This is almost always a good idea when you can, but sometimes the ecosystem is a bit shonky, or misaligned with what you're building. Eg, I want my program to have a fixed execution environment and instead I have debian and macos. I want a react-like API but the browser doesn't provide that. Etc. 2. Build a new thing on top of the ecosystem as it exists. Eg, build docker on top of linux. Build web frameworks. Invent the web browser, or couchdb views, or electron and build your software on top of that. The problem with this approach is that if each generation layers their own rubbish on top of the underlying layers then software will keep getting slower, more complex and more buggy over time. 3. Change the underlying system to work how you want it to work. Instead of using docker on top of ubuntu, replace ubuntu with nixos. Instead of using dpdk for higher storage performance, add io-uring to the linux kernel. I think I would prefer it if more people did option 3 rather than option 2. I think there's lots of ways modern computing systems could be better. I'd rather if linux gained the ability to run binaries from the web (for example) than we invent a new kind of binary in userland (docker containers) and run those. I don't want people in 100 years to still be using linux (with all the bad decisions it contains), but with 10 more layers of different generations' ideas stacked on top. (Oh, its linux - but with docker, and then most people run this specific container to run languageX, and that lets us run electo2050 apps, which in turn you can use to run IRC. It only uses 50 gigs of ram. So small and light!) Option 3 may require us to throw out or deprecate parts of the POSIX API. That may be overdue.

thefz 4y ago

While complaining that Git is haaaard.

adastra22 4y ago
Well git is hard tho
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It's easy if you always do exactly the right thing in the right order and never make mistakes, but if you for example want to undo a git merge[1], god have mercy. [1] https://opensource.apple.com/source/Git/Git-26/src/git-htmldocs/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.txt https://opensource.apple.com/source/Git/Git-26/src/git-htmld...
  - psychoslave 4y ago
    In doubt, I create a new branch from the main one, and test it goes when merging the one holding changes. It something goes wrong, at least the main branch is unaffected. Of course, you must already have some intuition that something could go wrong. :D
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - imetatroll 4y ago
    Reflog lets you see where HEAD has traveled from. Just go back in time. This isn't actually a hard problem to solve. If that sounds difficult just create a branch prior to merging so that you know where to reset your failed branch to.
    - BeeOnRope 4y ago
      They are trying to solve this problem without rewriting the branch.