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No offense to this guy, but the first argument that doesn't seem to make any sense is that you couldn't reproduce SO because it would take you 33 hours just to
by blhack 17y ago
No offense to this guy, but the first argument that doesn't seem to make any sense is that you couldn't reproduce SO because it would take you 33 hours just to type the existing code back into an editor. It seems like a pretty arrogant assumption that the existing code is the simplest possible code that could be used to provide this functionality.
Beyond that, he is ignoring the fact that...Stack Overflow is really not that obscure of an idea. There is posting questions and responses (or stories and comments); basically a blog which, by this point, is kindof trivial to put together.
User icons and profiles? Seriously? Not to be a prick, but I implemented those on my own website in a matter of about an hour. From scratch...and I am not a developer.
Okay, so...upvotes and downvotes and a frontpage that bubbles like reddit does? Mayyybe...how nice do we have to be to the database?
select (upvotes/(now() - time_submitted)) as heat from questions order by heat desc limit 50;
On a related note, he also mentions the scaling...so, what are our constraints here? What hardware are we using and how much do we get to use?
Okay, then search. Seriously? This is also something that most geeks have written at some point and would have no problem dusting off.
Granted, yeah, this guy is probably right. I don' think anybody is TOTALLY going to reproduce a verbatim copy of SO over the 4th of July weekend...but I don't think this guy (I am assuming he is the author of SO) should assume that he is th BEST, FASTEST dev in the world. Especially when he is talking about such a common problem; what is essentially a blog.
- Raphael_Amiard 17y ago>but I don't think this guy (I am assuming he is the author of SO) should assume that he is th BEST, FASTEST dev in the world. Where in the world did you see him say that ?
- blhack 17y agoThe first couple of paragraphs where he said that it would be impossible to recreate SO in a weekend because of how long the current code was. This is making the assumption that the new code would be the same length.
- PieSquared 17y ago>Okay, then search. Seriously? This is also something that most geeks have written at some point and would have no problem dusting off. Of course, because search is really quite a solved and ridiculously easy problem... You know, it's so easy I could probably reimplement Google in the same weekend, too. :P Not to be rude, but brushing off basics like search, upvotes and downvotes, etc as something 'most geeks have written' and can easily write again is a mistake. The amount of these minor features makes a real reimplementation in a weekend utterly impossible.
- jcl 17y agoI find his time-based argument compelling. While the SO code is likely not the simplest possible code, it is likely that it is within an order of magnitude. Moreover, coming up with the simplest possible code is hard work and would take longer than coming up with the original code, even if it would be a bit faster when typing it in. If it was not harder to write simpler code, people would write simple code to begin with.
- secret 17y agoHave you seen the "P2" theme for wordpress? There's your multi-user blog with most of the functionality you mentioned.