Hacker News Reader

Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I don't think this is positioned to replace Wordpress, Astro, Hugo, etc by any means.

It is just a barebones framework written as a love letter to the language of C.

If its a loveletter to a language than telling you the language is important because that's its sole reason for existing. Someone probably just took this on as a challenge for fun. It's not designed to be in the next YC cohort.

And for that reason, I enjoyed reading through the code and marveling at the simplicity and power of C. It made me warm and fuzzy. But I'm not going to use it. I might fork it and play with it for fun though.

Oof, as someone who has written hundreds of thousands of lines of C (at least), I'm not sure I'd write it a love letter. Maybe a letter of grudging respect, where I break up with it.

I don't think this is a "loveletter". It's at least 23 years old and is still maintained so it seems to be a serious project with people using it.

https://boston.conman.org/2023/01/19.1

You've fallen for the exact thing I was talking about. This software is written to serve blog websites though a CGI module. I don't even know what a "love-letter to C" is, but this software clearly exists with the intention of someone using it.

If you don't know what a love letter to C is, maybe you aren't the target demographic. That's fine, but there's no reason to get up in arms about it.

Perhaps you are too huffed up on your own farts (whatever that means) to realize this just isn’t for you, but for some reason, is living rent free in your head.

> I don't even know what a "love-letter to C" is

Oh come on, you've never done something just for the passion of it? Not trying to earn money or get famous, you just do something because you personally enjoy it with no other motivation than that.

Even if you haven't, a lot of people do stuff purely for their own personal satisfaction. That's what a "love letter to x" is. You just do it for the love.

We are going into a weekend, I challenge you to do something just for the love of it.

Code which achieves nothing is called "boilerplate" and I've yet to find anyone passionate about writing it. The joy of programming, to me at least, is solving problems. Hence code which does not solve problems is not enjoyable.

While I see where you're coming from, I think you're simply not the target audience. Similar to building an espresso machine out of Lego [0], building software doesn't have to only be about practicality for the general user, it can all the same be just for the sake of the art. A mountaineer might say they climbed the mountain because it was there, software can be built for similar reasons, or any hobby really.

[0] https://www.home-barista.com/knockbox/dual-boiler-espresso-m...

I get that, I really do, but the lines are often much more blurred here. If I had a penny for every supposedly useful thing "written in Rust/blazing fast", I would be rich. I think people should be a lot clearer when they write software that isn't really intended to be used. Most of what I see exists in the middle ground, where it is written as though it will not be used, but then put out in to the world as if the author wants people to use it.

This is literally the point of a lot of open source software... Sometimes its "hey i wrote this for me, here it is incase you stumble across it and find it useful". Sometimes it's "hey here's this thing i did that i find cool, y'all wanna work with me to improve it?". Sometimes its "look what I can do here's the code you can too!". Sometimes its even "Do you all think this approach has promise?".

In fact very few open source projects are big and professional like Linux. Most are just things people do out of interest or fun.

I have nothing against people who simply leave their stuff open to the public in case it might be useful. My issue is that a lot of this stuff is presented as something you should use when it really isn't fit for that. I've wasted a good deal of time on such projects, using them for a while before I realise they aren't fit for purpose.

While I think it's often a silly way to advertise, I think "utterly despise" is... caring a bit too much.

Sometimes I might care. In this particular case, it's useful for me to know it's written in C, as that's a sign that I'd never want to use it (the fewer internet-facing things written in C I use, the safer I'll be, in general).

But yes, "$FOO: A $BAR in $LANG" is generally a pretty lame way to advertise your project. Advertise based on what it actually does for me, not on your implementation details.

I don't know, "blog written in C" is way more interesting than "blog written in PHP".

Why? They do the same things in the same ways. One is just more likely to introduce a security vulnerability to your web server.

Why?

Both are different languages, and both work in different ways.

The interesting part to me is how the difference to serve the set same features is written.

One is an older language and the other is a older-modern language.

It's the same with mechanics. I would be more interested in watching and learning how an 1949 carousel with a vinyl player in the centre works than a 2024 carousel with an iPhone in the centre.

First of all, the implementation will likely be the same from a technical perspective and differ mainly in that the C code will have more boiler plate. Secondly, did you actually read the source code of this project? I feel like reading a PHP one would be more enjoyable purely because it would be more terse.

I get where you're coming from but this is hacker news, what do you expect? There's alot of people here interested in the technology rather then the "product".

I was watching a video the other day where some welder was skimming over settings on the welding machine and assumed I knew or cared what a vague statement "some mild grade steel" meant when he could have been marketing his cool looking product called "example welds".

I guess you'd call him a "a welder so huffed up on his own farts that he'd forgotten that the stuff he welds might also do something useful in addition to beind made of the metal and tools du jour".

The rest of us would realize it's not targetted at consumers of welded goods, but as a discussion or example for other welders. It's not something to be mad about, it's perfectly reasonable that welders talk to each other about welding, and sometimes weld things for fun or practice or to show off to each other.

In the world of programmers, we like to do the same thing. Most of us work either on something targetted at people who want marketing and handholding about how to use the product or on something so niche and that it's really only useful to other devs (and mostly the only devs its useful for are a small subset from the first group that work at the same company) - and we often charge for that kind of work. When something's on github, there's a high likelihood it was made by a programmer wanting other programmers to see it for one reason or another.

> I get that this is probably some kind of personal project, but I see so much of this nowadays and it really boils my biscuits.

This has been common since the late 90s when I started paying attention to programming things, and people weren't calling it a new trend then...

I would say the difference here is that no one is going to read it and see the code. As much as people fantasise about reading code, few actually do it and those that do are broadly wasting their time.

Your welding example is flawed because because the welder is showing things as examples. He compresses the range of things the tool can do into a useful format and presents that to people, rather than just welding some metal together without commentary. If this project and the techniques used to create it were documented, it might be comparable. A discussion of the solution to a given technical problem can be interesting and would be the equivalent to what the welder when he discusses the capability of his tools.

> I would say the difference here is that no one is going to read it and see the code. As much as people fantasise about reading code, few actually do it and those that do are broadly wasting their time.

You'd be surprised how much this statement is wrong. A lot of people enjoy reading the code of the esoteric projects. Case in point, a bunch of HNers are upvoting this and commenting on it.

It's not for you, fine. You're not interested. Fine. Shrug and move on, instead of writing half a dozen posts to let the world know you personally don't care much for it.

PS: you say it's "wasting their time". I've been in software long enough to know that the people who are good at reading code make some of the best programmers on my teams. Friendly advice: Get good at reading code. Especially when it's clunky, weird and esoteric. It'll go a long way.

Thanks for the insult, but I'm very adept at reading code. You know how I got that way? Not by aimlessly trawling through random projects, but by actually interacting with the source code. Picking a random bug on some open source project and solving it will yield ten times the benefit of just reading that project's source, with the added bonus that you achieve something productive at the end. Reading source code is a fantasy. Something that sounds good but falls flat in practice. Hence my almost certain claim that no one actually does it. I don't, do you?

You sure to spend a lot of time trying to tell other people how to use theirs. Projection maybe? I don't know, but I'd be willing to bet if you stopped looking for insults in freindly replies and railing futily against the existence of things other people find interesting you'd be happer.

Didn't mean to insult you. It's really meant as a friendly advice. I'm sharing experience.

I do read code. A lot. I'm not the only one. I know many people who do. I know people who print source code on paper to read on their bus ride back home.

Hell, I know people who read some of the most complicated source code you can imagine, annotate it, criticize it, and then blog about it[1].

It's very weird that you doubt it. Why would we lie? For karma and upvotes? I'm not sure I understand your point. We're literally in the comment thread of a post aimed at reading code and you're here arguing that we're not?

[1]: https://kotaku.com/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com