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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

This feels pointless. The world is in constant flux. There is nothing that’s ever perfect, or lasting, because the red queen keeps on running. Software should change to adapt, or it will become useless.

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Lots of tools haven't changed much in centuries.

It's hard to think of any single tool which hasn't been superseded along some axis.

People still use pens, for example. But if they want to write 100 copies of the same page, they'd much rather use a printer. People use hammers, but if they want to hammer in ten thousand nails, they might start thinking about automatic tools.

That's completely true. In this analogy Bear is intended to be the pen. Yes, printers are great, but pens are by no means obsolete.

But the pen you use today is quite different from a pen you would have used 100 years ago. Most people would not want to use 100 year old pen design as their 'daily driver'

Right -this is akin to refining features, not redefining scope of its use case

The ballpoint pen was invented in 1889. A simple ballpoint from 1922 was not significantly different than any ordinary pen used today.

I can't think of a major advance in pen design since about 1965 (Fisher pressurized space pen) and I don't expect any major advances before 2065.

Gel inks? Smaller ball-bearings in the Uniball line? Erasable ink? Not much there.

Also anybody who calls a pen their "daily driver" is probably well served by a vintage fountain pen, a form that arguably was at its peak in the early 20th century.

Honestly a pretty bad example.

Was you there Charlie? (That's a radio meme from the 1920's.) My father used fountain pens, good ones, but sooner or later there'd always be a mess. Ballpoint pens weren't practical until quite small ball bearings could be made very, very smooth and spherical. That didn't happen until the mid to late 1960s, when my father finally switched. Before then they were outrageously expensive and gave poor results. They really were very different from the ballpoint pens you can buy today, even if the basic principles are very similar. Mechanical pencils got used a lot, say for drafting, back then. Creating a nearly spherical ball bearing on a planet with gravity, electrostatic effects, noise, etc, etc, out of steel, the most elastic substance known, is no small feat.

An ancient greek scribe would have no problem using a pen you buy today.

Yet people still use both hammers and pens.

I use pen instead of a printer to write things down.

They might, but the hammer works. If it's too slow... get a second hammer and person. The world's great monuments were made without automatic tools, just time, patience and many people.

It's not the fastest or easiest, but it works, it's reliable, and it's cheap.

Anyway, in the context of software, think of the unix commandline tools; simple, single-purpose tools, a lot of which aren't updated frequently. But using those as lego blocks is directly or indirectly responsible for the multi-trillion industry we're in.

unix commandline tools

Even they get rewritten and updated and 'bloated' all the time. Compare the original BSD or AT&T tools to the latest GNU tools and you will see that they have been reworked, tweaked and updated countless times with many many new features added. In fact when the GNU tools started to become popular they where regularly accused of unnecessary bloat and being against the spirit and philosophy of Unix.

> Even they get rewritten and updated and 'bloated' all the time.

"All the time" is a stretch. The basic UNIX commands date back to the 70s and while they have grown more and more options over time, change is slow (which is a wonderful thing, to be clear). Yes, there was grumbling when GNU started adding even more options but even that is now decades ago.

As a consumer of the tools (whether by hand or by shell script), they provide a stable base to build on. I have some shell scripts from ca.1990 which still work fine. It's very pleasing to be able to build on top of a solid foundation that just keep working for a long time.

I tried to carry a printer in my pocket but pen is more convenient.

It feels like the idea of refining something to the goal perfection is not mutually exclusive to the idea of being adaptable.

To me it implies that since the definition of perfection is always changing, you are continually altering course to get closer to where you want to be.

Software can become useless if new technology comes, but it takes decades.

Maybe at a certain point it just makes more sense to build something new instead of endless iterations.

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