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The Suck Less Philosophy

suckless.org

12 pointssilentbicycle11 comments

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.

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/

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.

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. :/

"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

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.

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

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

Simplicity requires wisdom about what to omit.

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

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.

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