But that said, I don’t think dynamic linking is in the ELF spec. I believe that’s a de facto OS + dev tools thing rather than an ELF spec de jure thing. His points are still valid.
I'm not tone policing but contesting the premise that "aggressive tone" = "direct". For example
>(Windows took a different approach and got it right. In Windows, it's okay for multiple DLLs to provide the same symbol, and there's no sad and desperate effort to pretend that a single namespace is still cool.)
>(Windows got this right, where multiple DLLs can provide the same symbol)
There you go. Shorter, and not wasting 3 lines to express your feelings, and _you can still say Windows got it right_.
My feeling is that you can go in and describe a thing succinctly and to the point, and actually get your opinion across! It will be more effective, shorter, and your opinions are backed up with fact! No fluff needed.
It drives the point home though, and keeps the energy levels higher.
Is the argument too weak to do that on its own without the abuse?
Arguments are seldom weak or strong based on their technical details.
Heck, the technical details about this were already known to many people including several involved in build setups, but nobody cared anyway.
Personally for me, concise and information-dense writing makes me sit up and pay attention.
Being right is no excuse for being an asshole.
The attitude will appeal to some. It will strike many others in the wrong way and put them on the defensive.
There's no reason to write this way. A concise, well-articulated, non-combative post will appeal to everyone and still convey the same information.
Attacking that inanimate object is not without emotional repercussions to those related to that object.
You'll find somebody liking everything you can name. Even every attrocity has been done by somebody.
Not attacking the person is of course the correct thing.
But if you can't even attack the attrocity or bad choice, we've gone too far with this sensitivity thing.
(a) if you attack the practice is not abuse. Abuse is when you attack the person.
(b) if you don't have a colorful tone and strongly condemn something, for most the complaint wont even register
Maybe the argument isn't actually that good if you need to resort to theatrics to make the point register?
> But if you can't even attack...
Why do we need to attack something? If we can't explain and support our view that something is wrong or a bad decision without resorting to attacks, perhaps our argument isn't really that strong?
And that's the thing. I don't think the author really presented a strong argument; he tried to convince me by verbally trashing the other side, while the actual logical, coherent argument is buried in a sea of disdain. I think it's still not clear what the default should be. Do we optimize for performance, or for debugability and tinkerability? I mean, I feel like that's one of the classic debates that we still -- and will probably never -- have no hard answer for.
Edited to add: I went back and read the linked Python bug tracker issue[0], which honestly I wish was what HN linked to. It's concise, explains the problem, explains why LD_PRELOAD isn't all that useful for libpython, specifically why this sort of performance degradation is even worse with a library like libpython, and makes sure to call out that this change only affects libpython and not any other shared libraries, where (implicitly) people might find LD_PRELOAD useful.
It's rather the opposite: if we don't resort to attack, comdent the practice, raise the tone, our argument will be weak.
That's because it's not enough to be right. It also need to be memorable and resontant. Else people's eye will just glaze over it.
That's why this post has 218 comments as of now, and you where involved and will remember it better tomorrow, than some purely technical explanation that probably wouldn't even have made it in the first page (or have 0-10 comments, typical of such posts).
Agreed that we should not be excessively abrasive, and I think the facebook post is leaning that way - but I don't think a world without criticism can work - at a certain point in any field you have to face reality, in which some things work and some don't, and to protect every person involved from "emotional repercussions" is impossible because generally people's beliefs and feelings are all over the map.
At any rate I'm not sure the author of LD_PRELOAD or ELF dynamic symbol interposition is scanning this thread - and after ~30 years distance might have different opinions about them, or at least a thicker skin :)
Essentially a lot of criticism of the original article seems to be of the form of “reading strong, angry opinions like this make me feel insecure so please don’t do that”. And that might be a good reason to avoid writing like that. But tone policing, and insisting on emotionally desaturated writing has a cost for the reader and the writer. I think it makes us smaller. And it keeps us in our heads rather than in our hearts. That’s just not the way I want to live my life.
There's a big difference between 'clarity' and confrontational, negative language.
I found it not particularly clear at all. The entire thing can be boiled down to 2 or 3 sentences, or maybe as many as 10 if you want to include more background information.
When I was reading it, about halfway through I was thinking "god, when is this mediocre rant going to get to the meat of how to fix the problem?"
This means the writer is choosing to write for audience entertainment instead of technical advancement & improving the status quo. It's not impossible to do both at the same time, without the insulting tone.
I don't think that it would've been hard to maintain the exact same level of clarity regarding the subject matter. Perhaps the read was more entertaining due to the abrasive tone, but was it actually easier to read?
Ultimately, design decisions are made by people - if someone made such a takedown of ideas of mine, I would probably be somewhat discouraged, at least as long as I know they are being sincere and not just doing a bit. I don't think people should be flinching in their criticisms of ideas, but being fair to nuance and history really would be welcome too. It's one thing to point out dysfunctions in things, but it's different to pull out a sort of Angry Video Game Nerd-esque personality and drag how horrible things are through the mud.
Maybe this post is more in jest than not and I(/we?) simply did not pick up on the tone being purely for entertainment value. But that's the thing. When people read things like this, I think a lot of people take it too seriously and start to embody this attitude, and it leads to the kind of thought processes where things are either good, or stupid/evil/whatever, with no room for things that are just "not perfect, but overall fine."
Hell, I feel kind of bad due to how unnecessarily personal my comments regarding this feel. How would the author feel reading this? The fact that I may be right doesn't matter, because I'm not some kind of uncaring asshole, and I think most people are not if they are in the right mind.
> But that said, I don’t think dynamic linking is in the ELF spec. I believe that’s a de facto OS + dev tools thing rather than an ELF spec de jure thing. His points are still valid.
Like I had said initially, I do not take any issue with the factual content of the post, and agree that most people should be using these compiler flags. And yes, it is, however many years later from when this may have not been the norm, now clearly a good idea to make all of your symbols hidden by default. No disagreements from me. I just hope that people don't walk away with the idea that some morons from the past made some horribly stupid mistakes because they just had no idea what they were doing. I wasn't there, but it doesn't feel like that's what happened at all; it feels like as things panned out some things worked out well, and some things did not work out well. Some ideas are more clearly 'bad' ideas than they were. Even today, it would probably be unwise to assume we still know 100% what we're doing. Personally, I think it's hard to ever be absolutely sure you are taking the right lessons away from things that don't work out well.