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Comment by jbirer | Hacker News Reader

Even though I never met or knew Ritchie I still feel bad when I read about his death, when I was a teen I would go in rabbit holes reading about C and Unix, and would read about all the design decisions he made and the rationales for it, a true loss for the programming world.

The concepts of minimalism and modularism are being thrown away and it shows in the performance and stability of new software. It's a shame we have to learn the same lessons over and over.

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>Even though I never met or knew Ritchie I still feel bad when I read about his death, when I was a teen I would go in rabbit holes reading about C and Unix, and would read about all the design decisions he made and the rationales for it, a true loss for the programming world.

sounds a lot like me, even I still read docs related to old school UNIX and C to this day

>The concepts of minimalism and modularism are being thrown away and it shows in the performance and stability of new software. It's a shame we have to learn the same lessons over and over.

why though? is coding huge monolithic software easier to do rather than creating a set of modular and simple tools?

Yes, creating a monolith is usually easier and faster. It is also the wrong thing to do, more often than not. As they grow and mature, properly designed modular systems can be easier to debug, maintain, test, deploy, and document.

On the other hand, hardware has continued to expand to support the bloat in software. I do agree computer software design could be better, thanks Electron. My most used piece of software is written in Java. I also spend a lot of time in Electron. My terminal is written in D (Tilix). I guess my point is, it could be better, but there is no incentive to make it leaner so no one will try. Nothing is really stopping anyone from running old school Linux software though. I know guys who run FVWM and really minimalist configurations of their Linux systems.

That sounds interesting. Could you link some sources where I can read more about Ritchie's design decision for C and Unix?

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