4 ms·

The Lindy effect in software

35 points by ankitg12 3mo ago

Chu4eeno 3mo ago
I'd say rust is the new Java, not Go. Complete with rewriting everything in the trendy memory safe quasi-portable language that is faster than (poorly written) C in your personal microbenchmarks.
- rf15 3mo ago
  I work in enterprise, and java still reigns supreme. You see some (very limited) cracks coming from other jvm languages, but that's all. Nobody talks about Rust, rarely about C.
  - bee_rider 3mo ago
    Which enterprise? All the job postings I see are for C++ (Annoyingly. Fortran is better). Or Python obviously.
    - rf15 3mo ago
      can confirm, some do C++ (more than C, I meant C as a language family in my original post) Enterprise I've seen, all europe, deliberately vague: Banking, Telecoms, Trains, Insurance
  - onesandofgrain 3mo ago
    Isn't .NET kinda on quite a rise in enterprise?
    - pjmlp 3mo ago
      Not really, going open seems to only helped Microsoft shops to migrate to Linux for deployments, thus saving on server licences. I work in a polyglot agency, and the RFPs asking for .NET have gone down, even key enterprise products like Sitecore, have moved away from .NET.
      - onesandofgrain 3mo ago
        Without answering anything privately. Are you in Asia, Americas or Europe or Oceania?
        pjmlp 3mo ago
        Germany. Sitecore example you can easily check, Sitecore XP/XM is still .NET Framework, all new products usually use other programming stacks as extension SDK, mainly Next.js or plain JS/TS.
- LoganDark 3mo ago
  Huh? Rust is nothing like Java. Java is a dynamic type-erased garbage-collected managed abomination with FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition standard library.
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
  People have been rewriting software in better languages ever since there was more than one programming language. Eventually people will be rewriting Rust programs in GoombaLang or whatever. Isn't this what we want?
  - uecker 3mo ago
    I don't think this is what we want. We want people to maintain and incrementally improve existing software and tooling and not rewrite and change things all the time.
    - slopinthebag 3mo ago
      A rewrite doesn't need to actually change the public API or experience using the software. But by rewriting software, even in the same language we can learn from past mistakes and experiences and create better and more maintainable software.
      - uecker 3mo ago
        Sorry, I think the idea that rewrites are good way to achieve more maintenable software is basically always based on a delusion. It is a very common and well understood delusion for programmers who always see the existing code as crap and imagine a beautiful world when they could only rewrite it. A well understood mistake: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... In the context of free software it is usually also a method to be able to sideline part of the existing user or developer community, which you can not easily justify when making changes the existing project but can be achieved with a rewrite. But the former leads to a honest view of the trade-offs and consequences where the rewrite is a toxic power move.
        slopinthebag 3mo ago
        The issue with not rewriting or rebuilding things is that you miss out on the opportunity for conceptual changes and new approaches to solve problems in more robust and elegant ways. For example, Unreal Engine 6 will depreciate and eventually remove it's existing Actor based scenegraph with an entity component system. This is essentially a rewrite of the core of the engine, and it's a massive conceptual change away from the old style of inheritance-based OOP game programming to something which is much simpler to reason about and provides optimisations which are not possible with Actors. They aren't doing this out of delusion, it's that there are fundamental limitations to their current approach which are not solved by simply refactoring - it requires an entirely different conceptual approach which turns out to be simpler and better in pretty much every way. The problem with never rewriting is that you miss the chance to discover better ways of doing things. No system is ever built perfectly, if all you ever do is iterate on a bad foundation you're limited by that. Approaching a problem in a different way is only possible when creating something new. Of course you shouldn't rewrite something just to do it the same way, and you shouldn't rewrite something just because you don't understand it, but I also don't understand the perspective that you should never build something new when there is an existing solution, because it's often only through building out one or more bad solutions that you arrive at a good one. And if you follow such a strict rule, you never end up building anything good. In Unreal's case, they built the Actor system and have used it for almost two decades. In that time we have discovered better ways of doing things, and it would be a shame to be stuck with an inferior design because Joel said to never rewrite things almost three decades ago...
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  None of them are nowhere near the Java tooling and ecosystem. We only touch Go due to containers tooling, and Rust only due to the RIR stuff from Python and JavaScript. Enterprise consulting is staying with Java, .NET, JavaScript/Typescript, Python, Powershell, SQL, and co. Naturally Swift and Kotlin if doing mobile without Cordova, React Native and friends. C or C++ for native libraries, as those are what SDKs support out of the box without additional tooling. Boring technology for the most part, and usually a few versions behind stuck in some LTS.
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
(2023 - hopefully the post lasts another 100 years!)
Animats 3mo ago
Two words: Visual Basic.
KoleSeise1277 3mo ago
[flagged]
mrkeen 3mo ago
Terrific writing. Just terrific. Copied verbatim: The Lindy effect in software The longer a tech has been around, the more robust it is seen as compared to more recent ones, we often talk about a technology’s maturity The C language SQL has been around for a while, https://antonz.org/fancy-ql/ JS libraries seem to come and goes
- karmakurtisaani 3mo ago
  I somehow missed the sarcasm and went to read the article. Was a bit confused for a minute there..
- armchairhacker 3mo ago
  Still better than AI, it has personality and not paragraphs of empty prose
  - pillmillipedes 3mo ago
    you might be confused as to what terrific means
    - cstrahan 3mo ago
      Probably not, given that "terrific" was almost certainly used sarcastically here.
- Heloseaa 3mo ago
  I just realized my article was shared on HN (wasn't aware of the visite spike until 7 days later). Will work on the writing, I truly agree that my writing isn't the best. Thanks for pointing it out.
jdw64 3mo ago
The Lindy effect is ultimately a kind of momentum. If that's the case, it seems like it's not the language itself, but rather the 'contracts,' 'interfaces,' and 'standards' that survive longer than the specific implementations a language provides. Looking at the examples of Lindy that the OP mentioned, they're mostly at the infrastructure level. That's probably because many systems have been built on top of them, and the cost of replacing them is high. On the flip side, things with weak Lindy effects are likely frontend frameworks or specific libraries. CSS methodologies are a good example of that. In other words, the deeper something is, the harder it is to change, and as long as that deep language and its ecosystem aren't replaced, it will persist. As a counterexample, Fortran comes to mind—it's still being used today. Fortran has also evolved to exist beneath NumPy and Julia. Ultimately, I think the core isn't the Lindy effect itself, but rather how many people you can attract commercially, and how many jobs you can create based on that. In that sense, I think the next-generation language will succeed when it's used to build new infrastructure, and when the cost of refactoring becomes exponentially high. Right now, something that's growing similarly strong is CUDA. Personally, I'm always waiting to see what that language will be.
simianwords 3mo ago
If we had followed this more seriously in the past, we would have still stuck on to writing C for enterprise applications and had way too many memory bugs. Aren’t we glad there was a demographic who said no to C and brought the revolutionary idea to use Java instead? Couldn’t a Lindy enthusiast have gone “umm but isn’t Java too new and shouldn’t we just stick to C which is well trodden and understood??” It’s easy to write sloganeering articles. But it doesn’t tell me anything specific. Invoking Lindy is just bias to status quo. I prefer bias to progress but respecting chestertons fence.
- mansa10 3mo ago
  I think the Lindy effect is less about making strong arguments about which tool to use in debates, and more about calling out and explaining a real life phenomenon. I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage while they have the most plasticity is most likely going to be a good bet for the remainder of their career, as editors, operating systems and associated keybindings & UI will change around them much more often than those fundamentals. It's not a guarantee, and i wouldn't bet my entire business on the Lindy effect, but it is worth reflecting on it as an explanation of something that is paradoxical or not obvious.
  - simianwords 3mo ago
    I agree and the article uses Lindy not in descriptive but prescriptive level. For prescriptive, I would use Chesterton's Fence https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
  - orf 3mo ago
    > I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage Interesting - I see it as the opposite: learning the git CLI is pointless. It’s slow, clunky and it doesn’t teach you any of the very interesting inner-workings of Git. There are much better things to spend time learning, especially if your editor has a native git integration.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

35 points by ankitg12 3mo ago

I'd say rust is the new Java, not Go. Complete with rewriting everything in the trendy memory safe quasi-portable language that is faster than (poorly written) C in your personal microbenchmarks.

rf15 3mo ago
I work in enterprise, and java still reigns supreme. You see some (very limited) cracks coming from other jvm languages, but that's all. Nobody talks about Rust, rarely about C.
- bee_rider 3mo ago
  Which enterprise? All the job postings I see are for C++ (Annoyingly. Fortran is better). Or Python obviously.
  - rf15 3mo ago
    can confirm, some do C++ (more than C, I meant C as a language family in my original post) Enterprise I've seen, all europe, deliberately vague: Banking, Telecoms, Trains, Insurance
- onesandofgrain 3mo ago
  Isn't .NET kinda on quite a rise in enterprise?
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    Not really, going open seems to only helped Microsoft shops to migrate to Linux for deployments, thus saving on server licences. I work in a polyglot agency, and the RFPs asking for .NET have gone down, even key enterprise products like Sitecore, have moved away from .NET.
    - onesandofgrain 3mo ago
      Without answering anything privately. Are you in Asia, Americas or Europe or Oceania?
      - pjmlp 3mo ago
        Germany. Sitecore example you can easily check, Sitecore XP/XM is still .NET Framework, all new products usually use other programming stacks as extension SDK, mainly Next.js or plain JS/TS.
LoganDark 3mo ago
Huh? Rust is nothing like Java. Java is a dynamic type-erased garbage-collected managed abomination with FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition standard library.
slopinthebag 3mo ago
People have been rewriting software in better languages ever since there was more than one programming language. Eventually people will be rewriting Rust programs in GoombaLang or whatever. Isn't this what we want?
- uecker 3mo ago
  I don't think this is what we want. We want people to maintain and incrementally improve existing software and tooling and not rewrite and change things all the time.
  - slopinthebag 3mo ago
    A rewrite doesn't need to actually change the public API or experience using the software. But by rewriting software, even in the same language we can learn from past mistakes and experiences and create better and more maintainable software.
    - uecker 3mo ago
      Sorry, I think the idea that rewrites are good way to achieve more maintenable software is basically always based on a delusion. It is a very common and well understood delusion for programmers who always see the existing code as crap and imagine a beautiful world when they could only rewrite it. A well understood mistake: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... In the context of free software it is usually also a method to be able to sideline part of the existing user or developer community, which you can not easily justify when making changes the existing project but can be achieved with a rewrite. But the former leads to a honest view of the trade-offs and consequences where the rewrite is a toxic power move.
      - slopinthebag 3mo ago
        The issue with not rewriting or rebuilding things is that you miss out on the opportunity for conceptual changes and new approaches to solve problems in more robust and elegant ways. For example, Unreal Engine 6 will depreciate and eventually remove it's existing Actor based scenegraph with an entity component system. This is essentially a rewrite of the core of the engine, and it's a massive conceptual change away from the old style of inheritance-based OOP game programming to something which is much simpler to reason about and provides optimisations which are not possible with Actors. They aren't doing this out of delusion, it's that there are fundamental limitations to their current approach which are not solved by simply refactoring - it requires an entirely different conceptual approach which turns out to be simpler and better in pretty much every way. The problem with never rewriting is that you miss the chance to discover better ways of doing things. No system is ever built perfectly, if all you ever do is iterate on a bad foundation you're limited by that. Approaching a problem in a different way is only possible when creating something new. Of course you shouldn't rewrite something just to do it the same way, and you shouldn't rewrite something just because you don't understand it, but I also don't understand the perspective that you should never build something new when there is an existing solution, because it's often only through building out one or more bad solutions that you arrive at a good one. And if you follow such a strict rule, you never end up building anything good. In Unreal's case, they built the Actor system and have used it for almost two decades. In that time we have discovered better ways of doing things, and it would be a shame to be stuck with an inferior design because Joel said to never rewrite things almost three decades ago...
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 3mo ago
None of them are nowhere near the Java tooling and ecosystem. We only touch Go due to containers tooling, and Rust only due to the RIR stuff from Python and JavaScript. Enterprise consulting is staying with Java, .NET, JavaScript/Typescript, Python, Powershell, SQL, and co. Naturally Swift and Kotlin if doing mobile without Cordova, React Native and friends. C or C++ for native libraries, as those are what SDKs support out of the box without additional tooling. Boring technology for the most part, and usually a few versions behind stuck in some LTS.

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

(2023 - hopefully the post lasts another 100 years!)

Animats 3mo ago

Two words: Visual Basic.

KoleSeise1277 3mo ago

[flagged]

mrkeen 3mo ago

Terrific writing. Just terrific. Copied verbatim: The Lindy effect in software The longer a tech has been around, the more robust it is seen as compared to more recent ones, we often talk about a technology’s maturity The C language SQL has been around for a while, https://antonz.org/fancy-ql/ JS libraries seem to come and goes

karmakurtisaani 3mo ago
I somehow missed the sarcasm and went to read the article. Was a bit confused for a minute there..
armchairhacker 3mo ago
Still better than AI, it has personality and not paragraphs of empty prose
- pillmillipedes 3mo ago
  you might be confused as to what terrific means
  - cstrahan 3mo ago
    Probably not, given that "terrific" was almost certainly used sarcastically here.
Heloseaa 3mo ago
I just realized my article was shared on HN (wasn't aware of the visite spike until 7 days later). Will work on the writing, I truly agree that my writing isn't the best. Thanks for pointing it out.

jdw64 3mo ago

The Lindy effect is ultimately a kind of momentum. If that's the case, it seems like it's not the language itself, but rather the 'contracts,' 'interfaces,' and 'standards' that survive longer than the specific implementations a language provides. Looking at the examples of Lindy that the OP mentioned, they're mostly at the infrastructure level. That's probably because many systems have been built on top of them, and the cost of replacing them is high. On the flip side, things with weak Lindy effects are likely frontend frameworks or specific libraries. CSS methodologies are a good example of that. In other words, the deeper something is, the harder it is to change, and as long as that deep language and its ecosystem aren't replaced, it will persist. As a counterexample, Fortran comes to mind—it's still being used today. Fortran has also evolved to exist beneath NumPy and Julia. Ultimately, I think the core isn't the Lindy effect itself, but rather how many people you can attract commercially, and how many jobs you can create based on that. In that sense, I think the next-generation language will succeed when it's used to build new infrastructure, and when the cost of refactoring becomes exponentially high. Right now, something that's growing similarly strong is CUDA. Personally, I'm always waiting to see what that language will be.

simianwords 3mo ago

If we had followed this more seriously in the past, we would have still stuck on to writing C for enterprise applications and had way too many memory bugs. Aren’t we glad there was a demographic who said no to C and brought the revolutionary idea to use Java instead? Couldn’t a Lindy enthusiast have gone “umm but isn’t Java too new and shouldn’t we just stick to C which is well trodden and understood??” It’s easy to write sloganeering articles. But it doesn’t tell me anything specific. Invoking Lindy is just bias to status quo. I prefer bias to progress but respecting chestertons fence.

mansa10 3mo ago
I think the Lindy effect is less about making strong arguments about which tool to use in debates, and more about calling out and explaining a real life phenomenon. I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage while they have the most plasticity is most likely going to be a good bet for the remainder of their career, as editors, operating systems and associated keybindings & UI will change around them much more often than those fundamentals. It's not a guarantee, and i wouldn't bet my entire business on the Lindy effect, but it is worth reflecting on it as an explanation of something that is paradoxical or not obvious.
- simianwords 3mo ago
  I agree and the article uses Lindy not in descriptive but prescriptive level. For prescriptive, I would use Chesterton's Fence https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
- orf 3mo ago
  > I've invoked it in my job mostly to explain to younger developers why learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage Interesting - I see it as the opposite: learning the git CLI is pointless. It’s slow, clunky and it doesn’t teach you any of the very interesting inner-workings of Git. There are much better things to spend time learning, especially if your editor has a native git integration.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]