Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcfwik | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, added an edit to my above post before I saw this, just to summarize:

I think that's a more reasonable complaint, but I fear it's too vague to be applicable.

The STEPS folks would probably say that a modern computing environment in ~20kloc is something that was previously unaccomplished and thought to be unaccomplishable, but you're writing that off/not counting it as such, presumably because it failed.

On the other end of the spectrum, things like Git (to my knowledge) did come out of the "find a better way to source control" incremental improvement mindset. (Of course, you can say the distributed model was "previously unaccomplished," but the line here is blurry.)

View on HN

I don't think Git itself is a revolution or new technology. It took what people were trying to do (but with extremely frustrating bad user experience, like taking an hour to change branches locally) and just did it very well by focusing on what is important and throwing away what isn't. It's an achievement of fitting a solution to a problem .

I don't think they DID build a modern computing environment at all. They built something that kindof aped one, but unlike Git they missed the parts that made a computing environment useful for users. It's more like one of those demo-scene demos where you say "Wow how did they get a commodore 64 to do that!?"

If they did build a modern computing environment with 20k LOC, that is a trillion dollar technology. Imagine how much faster Microsoft or Apple would be able to introduce features and build new products if they could do the same work with 2 orders of magnitude less code! That is strong evidence that this wasn't actually the result.

> I don't think they DID build a modern computing environment at all.

I agree that, now, after they've tried and failed, we can say they didn't build a modern computing environment in 20kloc.

My point is just that, when they were pitching the project for funding, there was no real way to know that this "trillion dollar technology" goal would fail whereas nukes/moon mission/etc. would succeed. Hindsight is 20/20, but at the beginning, I don't think any of these projects defined themselves as "doing something that lots of people are trying to do all the time;" instead they would probably say "nobody else has tried for a 20kloc modern computing system, we're going to be the first."

Given they all promised to try something revolutionary, I'm not sure it's fair to claim after-the-fact how obvious it is that one would fail to achieve that vs. another.

But I do take your point that it's important in general not to fall into the trap of "do X but tweak it to be a bit better" and expect grand results from that recipe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com