Hacker News Reader

Fascinating that Kay describes Ivan Sutherland as the inventor of OOP with his Sketchpad. Not only the inventor of computer graphics, but OOP, both in an MA thesis. No wonder Licklider handed the guy the keys to the Information Processing Techniques Office. Insane. We should all go home.

View on HN

Today I struggled with making a basic flowchart. (There was no shortage on a plethora of tools). I wish I had a pen to draw it as easily as in this video from ... 1965!!!

Today I stared in horror at pages and pages of kubernetes documentation on composing controllers.

Did we go offtrack somewhere? Did we get stuck in some local minima somewhere?

I think most of what we've built is made of too many parts. I think it's partly because we no longer make the same thing a thousand times, refining it as we go. We don't reduce software to its essence like we did with common tools like a hammer or a dish sponge. We take software parts off the shelf and use them wholesale for 10% or 1% of their total capability. Trimming the unused remainder and integrating it all to suit the problem better would require we stop and learn what those dependencies are made of and how they work. In our rush to ship, we rely on abstraction for speed, but abstraction has a cost too, and it has been compounding for decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com