
The Suck Less Philosophy - silentbicycle
http://www.suckless.org/common/index.html
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swombat
_Most hackers actually don't care much about code quality._

Wtf is he going on about?

 _The bad news: quality rewrites rarely happen, because hackers are proud of
large amounts of code._

Anyone else getting tired of strawman arguments?

 _Many (open source) hackers are proud if they achieve large amounts of code,
because they believe the more lines of code they've written, the more progress
they have made._

O RLY. Well, I know quite a few open source hackers, and you know what? They
don't fit that crappy definition. Not one of them.

So, another article attacking some illusory definition of the word "hacker".
I'm getting real tired of them.

~~~
silentbicycle
Swap "hackers" for "programmers" (or self-described "hackers" who haven't
developed good habits yet, or what-have-you) and the points are spot on. Who
hasn't worked with code which is needlessly verbose, needlessly hard to
maintain, and seems to have been organized by _pushing things in harder_?

See also: <http://www.laputan.org/mud/>

~~~
swombat
Needing to swap words around for a statement to make sense is not exactly a
sign of a great statement.

For instance:

 _Lisp sucks_

...but that statement is true so long as you swap "PHP" for Lisp.

 _PHP sucks_

See what I mean?

There's a pretty wide chasm between saying that "many open-source hackers"
suck and saying that "some self-described hackers who haven't developed good
habits yet" suck. One is an extremely confrontational, unsubstantiated
statement, whereas the other one is a platitude.

Turning platitude into controversial, confrontational statements is easy, but
hardly remarkable.

~~~
silentbicycle
You know what? I changed my mind, I agree with you. It's pretty manifesto-ish,
and it really appealed to my emotions.

I posted the link because I _really_ like several of their projects (dwm,
dmenu, libixp) -- they seem to have the same aesthetic as the core Unix/Plan 9
people (e.g. K&R, Rob Pike) and djb. I'm also suffering through maintaining a
rather large codebase right now. :/

------
KevBurnsJr
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent.
It takes a lot of courage, and a touch of genius, to move in the opposite
direction."

\- Albert Einstein

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stcredzero
I see more blogging around ideas like this. Maybe it means we're winning? "We"
being the small language/simple but powerful ideas camp.

Coders tend to be the kind who like complex mechanism. So we err on the side
of too much of it.

~~~
silentbicycle
It's the usual push and pull throughout history between the minimal and
baroque, I think. Simplicity is often hard to get right.

~~~
stcredzero
Yeah. Somehow my quest for simplicity has always been bewilderingly
complicated.

~~~
silentbicycle
Simplicity requires wisdom about what to omit.

~~~
stcredzero
I'm actually talking about dealing with management. I'm thinking it's time to
omit them.

------
DarkShikari
This is similar to the philosophy maintained in the project I work in, x264:
code duplication is the enemy and abstraction is your friend. Even in assembly
coding, macros are used heavily to turn thousand-line functions into four
lines of macro calls. The maintainability difference is unbelievable--the less
code you have to write to do something, the easier it is to understand and the
easier it is to change in the future. Furthermore, the shorter the code, the
more you can fit on the screen at one time, and therefore the easier it is to
get the whole picture.

The mark of an effective programmer is that he is able to do this abstraction
no matter what the situation he is in--regardless of language or platform.

