Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar [LWN.net]

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 21, 2012 16:18 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar by JEFFREY
Parent article: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

The real smart ones will settle for "worse is better," and "Doing one thing well [enough]." And those who do will not be stuck in a quagmire of runtime engines and debuggers. They are the ones who will actually get their tasks done and their legacy will be a handful of scripts that are still used years after their authors' deaths.

You mean things like TeX? Sorry to disappoint you but it was on fast-track to extinction and oblivion before it's descendant embraced "feature creep" approach which may be, just may be, will give a new lease of life.

*Not* dead and buried. Those of you who wish to write massive bloatware and spend the rest of your lives debugging, have fun.

You may spend the rest of lives doing mostly pointless work of writing massive bloatware and debugging it or you can spend your time and write handful of scripts that are still used [many] years after their authors' deaths where many will be equal to two, or, if you are lucky, for ten.

I try to keep scripts intended for my own consumption as small and simple as possible because they are not the point (the result of their work is), but if you want to write some program for someone else then you only have two sensible choices:

Write massive bloatware and hope that it'll be useful in the future.
Write lean and mean system which will not be useful with almost 100% certainity.

Choice is yours, but I'm not sure why you think second outcome is preferable.

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Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 21, 2012 18:54 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I'm not sure how well tar fits with the "do one thing and do it well" motto anymore. Source code for the latest version of GNU tar weighs in at 13.5 MB and 825 files. It has more than 40 single letter command line switches and over 100 full command line switches. It may have been a nice, simple program once, but we've kept asking it to do more and more things until it became a monster.

I think this kind of thing is more or less inevitable. We've been asking our computers to do more and more, and you can't do that without adding more complexity somewhere. It can either be at the level of adding more simple, single-purpose programs or at the level of adding complexity to existing programs, but one way or the other the system gets more complex. The only way we can keep the nice, simple, clean Unix that we had 30 years ago is to stop asking it to do more than we did with it 30 years ago.

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 21, 2012 20:38 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Well said.

Its always an interesting thought experiment to see how much of what we do with modern systems can fundamentally be done with 30yr old tech. Instead of HTTP and the Web there was Telnet or 3270 which fulfilled much of the same goals as an application delivery platform. Graphics would be right out but the core functionality of apps like Twitter, Facebook, GMail, word processing and office apps etc. could be done on 30yr old systems. Maybe the biggest problem would not be functionality but scale, no system of the day could scale to the many millions of active users that current systems support, AFAIK.