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Comment by jama211 | Hacker News Reader

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

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Great analogy. We've attempted to produce these systems and every time what emerges is software which makes easy things easy and hard things impossible.

You can design furniture without nails or screws. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_carpentry

Reason Japanese carpenters do or did that is that sea air + high humidity would absolutely rot anything with nail and screw.

No furniture is really designed from a single tree, though. They aren't massive enough.

I agree with overall sentiment. But the analogy is higly flawed. You can't compare physical things with software. Physical things are way more constrained while software is super abstract.

> Reason Japanese carpenters do or did that is that sea air + high humidity would absolutely rot anything with nail and screw.

The other reason was that iron was very expensive in Japan as they had only low quality iron ore.

I can and will compare them, analogies don’t need to be perfect so long as they get a point across. That’s why they’re analogies, not direct perfect comparisons.

I very much enjoy the Japanese carpentry styles that exist though, off topic but very cool.

I can tell you about 1000 ways, the problem is there are no corporate monetary incentives to follow them, and not much late-90s-era FOSS ethos going around either...

By that, you must admit that at least in a sense you imply they’re not cost effective, or practical.

This is a terribly confused analogy, afaict. But maybe if you could explain in what sense boilerplate, as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_text, is anything like a nail, it could be less confusing.

There are construction systems, for example in Japanese traditional architecture, that use no nails or screws. Good joinery often removes their need.

Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer.

Some amount of boilerplate probably needs to exist, but in general it would be better off minimized. For a decade or so there's sadly been a trend of deliberately increasing it.

Rather, it is boilerplate that replicates hammers along with nails.

>Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer

It's rather saying that we should have parts that join without nailing by now, especially for things we do again and again and again and again.

Did you read shouldn’t when they wrote should?

I didn’t say it should exist, only implied it’s a practical inevitability for the moment.

Carpenters/framers are less skilled and paid less than cabinetmakers. But the world needs more carpenters.

The value is where the demand is, or where the market values it and not just in a skill of working with wood with tools to create nearly anything.

While it sounds likely true for the US, it's the opposite in Germany: likely due to societal expectations on "creature comforts" and German homes not being framed with 2x4's but instead getting guild-approved craftsmen to construct a roof for a brick building (with often precast concrete slabs forming the intermediate floors; they're segmented along the non-bridging direction to be less customized).

Since we invented the tree and control its parameters and features, this is actually correct.

We’re limited by the limits of our invention though. We can’t set the parameters and features to whatever we want, or we’d set them to “infinitely powerful” and “infinitely simple” - it doesn’t work like that however.

Those parameters of the invention that limit people from just doing away with boilerplate are ones they won't change, not can't.

Well, depending on the value proposition, or the required goals, that’s not necessarily true. There are pros and cons to different approaches, and pretending there aren’t downsides to such a switch is problematic.

Even Star Trek has self-sealing stem bolts, they don't just 3d print their ships

They do sometimes 3D print at least smaller ships by the 2380s.

Love this analogy.

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