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Comment by buzzkillington | Hacker News Reader

UI is hard because you're using a hyper text language with fewer features than were the standard in the 60s. Then with styling on top of that, then with a scripting language on top of that.

Reading Computer Lib/Dream Machine over the holidays and I wonder where it all went so wrong.

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Free markets hate good software. "Good" meaning secure, stable, and boring.

On both ends.

Software developers hate boring software for pragmatic HR-driven career reasons and because devs are apes and apes are faddish and like the shiny new thing.

And commercial hegemony tends to go to the companies that slap something together with duct tape and bubble gum and rush it out the door.

So you get clusterfucks like Unix winning out against elegantly designed Lisp systems, and clusterfucks like Linux winning out against elegantly designed Unix systems, and clusterfucks like Docker and microservices and whatever other "innovations" "winning out" over elegantly design Linux package management and normal webservers and whatnot.

At some point someone important will figure out that no software should ever need to be updated for any reason ever, and a software update should carry the same stigma as...I don't know...adultery once carried. Or an oil spill. Or cooking the books. Whatever.

But then also it's important to be realistic. If anyone ever goes back and fixes any of this, well, a whole lot of very smart people are going to go unemployed.

Speaking of which...

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm

Free markets hate unchanging software. Software churn generates activity and revenue, and the basic goal of the game is to be the one controlling the change. Change is good when you have your hands on the knobs and levers, bad when someone else does. Organizations try to steer their users away from having dependencies on changes that they don't control. "You're still using some of XYZ Corp's tools along with ABC's suite? In the upcoming release, ABC we will help you drop that XYZ stuff ..."

That brings to mind one common computer scientest fallacy - that elegence is an end to itself. It may share some properties which make it practical but unfortunately it is not in practice.

Recursive solutions are more elegant but you still use a stack and while loop to not smash the stack.

Scheme is properly tail-recursive and has been around since 1975. Most (all?) Common Lisp implementations have proper tail recursion. Clojure has tail call optimization for simple cases and only if you explicitly ask for it, but it gets you most of the way there most of the time.

So there are reasons to prefer more imperative languages and their systems, but stack-smashing isn't one of them.

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