4 ms·
So true! All of this makes me feel like I missed out on the golden era of open source. I mean I was there 25 years ago but my programming skills were not good e
by distcs 4y ago
So true! All of this makes me feel like I missed out on the golden era of open source. I mean I was there 25 years ago but my programming skills were not good enough to write something like ls command, let alone something like curl!
If I knew as much about programming 25 years ago as I know now, maybe I may have thought of writing something like curl or wget too and make a successful project out of it. But alas! Those days are gone. And developing a new project these days comes with so much baggage. Developing something like curl from scratch today would be a mammoth task. The HTTP/HTTPS protocol spec has become huge! And so many compatibility issues to consider and resolve even for creating an MVP that can get some minimal adoption.
What good problems are there today that curious developers like me can work on? Problems that do not have a huge historical baggage and compatibility issues to worry about? Problems that are still new and tractable enough for a single person to work on and get an MVP out?
- keyle 4y agoYou could tackle curl as a service. I don't think anyone has done that one yet, Yahoo pipes got close, but we don't talk about Yahoo without losing all credibility. I'll take 10% and I'll see you at the IPO!
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoIt doesn't have to be anything new; you could contribute to the SDKs of some of the current-day new programming languages like Rust and Go, that will have reimplementations of what curl does as well. Nothing I can think of that will make you important though.
- dale_glass 4y agoI think it's less curl and more the author's personality, at least in this case. Curl seems to pop up here amazingly often. I don't think wget for instance has the same prominence, or gpg, or many other tools.