
Suckless Philosophy and Manifesto - magnusjonsson
http://suckless.org/philosophy
======
RyanZAG
More code often translates to more features on the ground, though. While I
prefer to run software that is running on amazing, concise and well designed
code - ultimately, none of these criteria come into my software selection.

If I have a choice of two pieces of software: (1) having a lot of features,
not-too-bad start-up time, usable UI, and good compatibility with other
software I need to use. (2) missing some important feature, fast start up,
pretty UI, poor compatibility. Then I (and nearly everyone else) is going to
choose option 1. Best example of this is, obviously, Microsoft Windows.

Comes down to something simple: the only people who care about the quality of
the code are those who have to look at the code. Everyone else is only
interested in the surface layer, and sometimes even bad code doesn't show up
on the surface if it's been battle-hardened with enough bug fixes.

~~~
icebraining
More features can be handle by more pieces of software, each doing one and
only one thing ("cat -v Considered Harmful").

~~~
jfb
Up to a point. But then, interesting work will need to be done with a large
graph of small pieces of software, which starts to look a lot like a large
piece of software. Delaying complexity is not the same thing as avoiding it;
the former can be a reasonable approach, the latter is whistling past the
graveyard.

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norswap
I like their philosophy, and I like the C language (its a beautiful minimal
thing, although there is definite room for improvement). But making software
that sucks less in C is still a hard sell.

~~~
slurry
I like suckless too, and use some of their tools (surf is a godsend for my
dying laptop) but I find it interesting they linked to the "Duct Tape
Programmer" essay at the bottom. I mean, aren't they doing another kind of
opposite to duct tape programming?

"Write beautifully clean and minimal C code" seems to me just as detached from
"just ship the damn thing!" as doing massively multi-inheritanced templated
C++ architecture, albeit in the opposite direction.

~~~
S4M
I was wondering exactly the same thing, especially after reading "Most hackers
actually don’t care much about code quality. Thus, if they get something
working which seems to solve a problem, they stick with it.".

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klodolph
To me, a "suck less" philosophy means that my environment should:

* Mount flash drives automatically when I plug them in.

* Let users configure the wireless network connection, and set it to automatically reconnect with the same settings to different APs on the same network, and let users override certificate settings for the same, and remember the overridden settings.

* Let users configure printer settings.

Sure, dwm is great if you spend all of your time in xterm and emacs/vim. But I
spend at least 0.02% of my time doing the above tasks, and I don't want to
inflate that number.

Some people believe that the fewer lines of code they write, the more elegant
their software becomes. Bull. Just like writing more lines doesn't make your
code better, writing fewer lines doesn't make it better.

~~~
AskHugo
I think you're confusing Window Managers (WMs) with Desktop Environments (DEs)

~~~
klodolph
I'm not really confused, just not very fond of cobbling together a usable
system out of several dozen different applications, which I must individually
install and configure. Gnome fixes that problem.

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keithpeter
I have used dwm as a window manager, along with dmenu for application
selection. I tend to mix and match their stuff as I find the convenience of a
desktop manager (gdm/slim) and a graphical file manager (thunar) useful. I'm
glad they are around as an alternative!

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guard-of-terra
"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"

Citation needed.

~~~
jfb
Yeah, it's a bit flaky; but it's more like a conflation of two different
cultures by the term "hacker" than a malicious slam.

~~~
guard-of-terra
I've never seen an open source developer that cared about line count except in
a negative sense.

Can't imagine one. People like that don't do open source.

------
mattront
Nobody sets out to write bad code. It is easier not to suck if you can control
/ choose the scope of your project. But more often than not, the scope is
dictated by a real-world set of complex needs and circumstances that evolve
throughout the whole live of the project.

In the end, good UI, proper testing and responsive customer support play a
bigger role in customer satisfaction than the quality of code.

~~~
michaelochurch
_Nobody sets out to write bad code._

No, but a lot of people (especially managers trying to get promoted via over-
ambitious IT projects) set out to write Big Code, which goes that way almost
always.

 _In the end, good UI, proper testing and responsive customer support play a
bigger role in customer satisfaction than the quality of code._

If you've been in the enterprise long enough, you've learned that some systems
are so far gone in code quality that keeping the UI and customer support up to
date becomes impossible. Fixing one bug creates two more.

------
codygman
I use dwm and sometimes st if I want a really quick terminal or need a really
minimal one.

