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Comment by redleader55 | Hacker News Reader

What was the problem being solved by choosing such a strange stack? Can someone explain why this generation(of which I am part of) builds weird things? "Show HN: ARM16 kernel built using brainf*ck compiled on PDP-11", "Show HN: Lisp inspired language that uses the Chinese character for monkey instead of parentheses".

There are a lot of useful things to be build, but does everything has to be quirky in some form? Are we so limited in our imagination, that we decided the ultimate artistic achievement is to be "different", not good different, just weird different? I don't find it funny, I don't find this creative, it's just different for the sake of being different. We are, if I may use the term, in a baroque era of software development. Instead of going for efficiency, simplicity and extracting the essential, we go for the unusual, uncalled for, uncanny and unconventional.

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There is an old and very short article by RMS on the origin of the word "hacker":

https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

If you read that, and then remember that this site is called "Hacker News", perhaps that will illustrate things.

RMS also created GNU which is used by billions today. Neither Linus, nor RMS, nor anyone who ever started these well known "hacker" project in their basement/university did things just for fun. Despite all the downvotes, I think it's useful to remember that.

I think I see what you mean: There's a lot of potential for better (free) software, especially outside the "software for software developers" domain. Compared to that, a "quirky thing" seems insignificant. But consider the following: The author of a quirky thing probably learned a lot about the tech and working around the constraints they put on themselves which is, in a way, education. Plus, quirky stuff probably attracts other people to learn about its tech more than something "serious".

Apart from that, I think a lot of commercial software development is even more "useless". In the sense that, a lot of software is reinvented without any real improvements or much "educative benefits" for its developers.

I would argue that if the comercial software authors manage to convince someone to pay money for it, it means that someone is extracting some value which allows them to pay for said software. It also means that someone is investing time to learn, to install, and finally to use that product.

It's not just about the products themselves (although some products are probably also just clones of something that already existed with better marketing) but rather about everything a software company does in general. Think websites, random general-purpose code and development processes. I think there's a lot of repeated effort in those areas that could be avoided if we all magically knew about each other's problems and worked on common solutions. (Note: I don't think that will ever really happen.) Publicly available frameworks and libraries are sort of that although there's still a lot of "grunt work" overall.

My point wasn't that commercial software is actually useless though. More like, in the grand scheme of things, even something that's just quirky for the sake of being quirky is kinda useful.

For fun?

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